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Seisaku Funatsu. Wilson also met with Suzuki, manager of the Yokohama Nursery Company; Takenoshin Nakai (18821952), an expert on Korean plants and cherries; and the "godfather" of Japan's modern botany, Tomitaro * Makino (18621955). Wilson's extensive travels and broad interviews with specialists enabled him to provide a superb overview of botanic species in The Cherries of Japan (1916). The Japanese horticultural forms, however, are presented in an abridged form, and Wilson's grouping of them under a doubtful Prunus lannesiana was unfortunate. Manabu Miyoshi (18611939), a professor at the Imperial University in Tokyo and founder of ecology as a science in Japan, was instrumental in setting up a government policy to designate natural monuments. His activities in this field have often a touch of oldfashioned nationalism: the natural monuments he proposed are singular specimens of old trees, often memorials for a heroic military or imperial event. Each cherry is described and given forma status, resulting in an impractical list of more than a hundred "forms" of the Japanese mountain cherry. Miyoshi reportedly was not a very sociable character, and various discrediting stories still circulate in Japan. Even amiable Ingram stated that Miyoshi was "more of a 'museum botanist' than a horticulturist, and I have good reason to believe that he relied very largely on Mr. Funatsu for the vernacular names of the cherries he described with such meticulous care." Wilson and Miyoshi were rivals, and both were determined to publish the first cherry monograph. The two do not mention each other in their books. Only twenty days before Wilson's book was published, Miyoshi's work on cherries appeared, full of typesetting errors. Written in German, Miyoshi's Japanische Bergkirschen, ihre Wildformen und Kulturrassen is a volume of the Journal of the College of Science, Imperial University of Tokyo (10 March 1916). Those twenty days were not a coincidence: the preceding volume on Rosaceae in the same journal was published by Wilson's guide Gen'ichi Koidzumi in 1913. Miyoshi's opinion thus has twenty-days' priority over Wilson's. The horticultural cherries of Japan are described extensively by Miyoshi and accompanied by lithographic color illustrations. Miyoshi lumps all the garden cherries under Prunus serrulata as it was described by Lindley in 1830, giving a black-and-white photograph of the herbarium specimen kept in the Cambridge University Herbarium that confirms Lindley's description. According to the internationally prevailing taxonomy rules, Miyoshi's view