The flowering cherries have been as early and magnificent as the magnolias and camellias. They are a month ahead of their season in this crazily accelerated year. The quantity of flower is amazing, but two lifetimes ago, flowering cherries were an uncommon sight in Britain. Now they are in every suburb. Yet their main home is Japan. A Japanese proverb goes: “The cherry is first among flowers as the samurai is among men.”
Most of the ones we grow were found or bred from Japanese originals. Next to none of them was known until 1853, when Japan opened to western visitors. It then turned out there were at least 250 varieties of cherry in Edo, the capital. Since the 17th century, local warlords had been planting cherry gardens in the city when they came compulsorily to court. Japan had 10 native species, but cross-pollinating and grafting had added many more. Eventually, Britain was to add yet another variety in an extraordinary sequence of observation and skilled gardening. It is told in outline in gardening texts but only now has it been fully researched in a remarkable book, “Cherry” Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms. Japan was the main beneficiary of the discovery, but there, the story is hardly known.
The author, Naoko Abe, won a major literary prize in Japan with what she has now revised for an anglophone audience. The hero, Collingwood Ingram, is remarkable. He suffered as a boy from bronchitis and never went to school. He had private tutors who taught him anything from Latin to French. The family was well off. His grandfather had founded the Illustrated London News; Collingwood’s younger brother was to edit it for 63 years until 1963. Young Collingwood loved hunting on the Kentish land round Thanet. Aged 17, he was invited to become a master of the local hunt, which his father mainly financed. Until March each year he hunted. In April he watched birds. In August he shot grouse. In November he stalked and shot deer in Scotland. Hunting, he thought, is a “primordial instinct inherent in all men”.