Spring Is Just a Basin of Cherries

It’s been two years now that we’ve lived in DC and three cherry-blossom seasons, but this was the first time I got myself down to the tidal basin during their (this year creepily early) peak flowering.

I admit it; I was completely enchanted, so much so that I took some typical monuments-and-flowers shots of the kind I usually scoff at.

I’m not necessarily proud of having taken the photos, but I’m not ashamed to acknowledge how very taken I was by the blossoms. There’s something amazing about them—first, their profusion, so that as you approach them it looks as if banks of rose-tinted clouds have settled in vast lines, floating right above the water.

But even more than their numbers, it’s their astonishing, contradictory delicacy that’s so appealing: that on these dark, gnarled, rigid boughs and trunks this gauze, this fragile lacework, should float, like gossamer veils trailing from tough, pruny old ladies.

That fragility and flexibility—the petals trembling, the branches leaning almost into the water of the basin—seduced me completely.

I wasn’t the only one, either; even at 9:30am on a Wednesday, the path was well-traveled by tourists and intense-looking people with cameras. It was also positively filled with birdsong, mostly from the starlings singing their lusty little hearts out in the cherry trees. It appears to be a popular nesting ground for them, and so intent were they on sex that they didn’t seem to mind at all the voyeuristic photographers aiming lenses at them.

Do the starlings favor the cherries simply because their thick branches and sometimes-hollowed trunks provide plenty of space for nests, or is there some part of them that, like us, delights in the profligate, fleeting beauty of the blossoms? After all, birds do show aesthetic preferences in their choice of mates—and, in some species, of nest or decorated bower. Who’s to say that they don’t also have an eye for beauty when they choose nesting sites?

Or maybe there are just plenty of crumbs left by the visiting tourists and picnickers with which to stuff demanding fledglings.

Either way, it was a somewhat magical morning, and I’m glad I managed to visit at a day and time when I was still sharing the view with more starlings than humans. Whatever the birds’ visual preferences, they’re a lot more restful—and prettier—to be around.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}