 People love cherry trees for a lot of reasons. I think obviously they're so beautiful and I think it's just a way for people to connect with nature and just sort of see the the beauty and kind of the awesomeness of flowering plants. My name is Margaret Pooler and I'm the director of research here at the US National Arboretum. We're located in Washington DC. One thing that the National Arboretum does is research and one of the species that we work on is flowering cherries and we're in one of our research fields right now. In our research program we create hybrids that is we take pollen from one plant and put it on another plant to combine the best traits from both of those and so most of the plants here in our research field are various hybrids of that kind that we've created. So this is an example of just one of the trees in our research field that's one of our hybrids. You can see it's an earlier flowering one because as you can tell it's already pretty much finished the peak bloom. It's already dropping some of its petals. There's a big weeping cherry tree out by the herb garden. You have to see that and there are several other weeping ones along the way. Another favorite of mine a species that blooms a little later is one called the Sargent Cherry that's a larger tree but has really clear pink blooms. The Yoshino cherries have a long history here in the U.S. They came here over a hundred years ago as a gift from Japan. They came specifically to be planted around the tidal basin down at the National Mall and in fact some of those a very few of those original plants still exist there. The reason they're so spectacular is because there's so many of them all in bloom at once. The ones here you can look at them more individually. Great place to take the family and just walk around and be outside so in far less crowded than down at the tidal basin. Oh we are having a lovely day with family field trip, having picnic here yeah and breathing fresh air cleaning our mind. They are beautiful it just is breathtaking and they smell so wonderful and it just it's yeah it's perfect. It's been a very long winter so this makes it a refreshing change of pace.