This book is a stunningly beautiful record of the nation's biggest springtime festival. As the 100th anniversary of the National Cherry Blossom Festival approaches in the Spring of 2012, millions of people from across the country will gather to revel in the beauty of the Cherry Blossoms. Capturing the true essence of spring, Blunt's striking photography will also allow those who are unable to travel to the festival the chance to experience the splendor of the blooming cherry blossoms through his photography.

The most significant of the more than 175 varieties of Japanese ornamental trees featured, along with a discussion of Japanese garden design, and cultivation tips for home gardeners.

In 1952, William Arthur Fickling, Sr., discovered the identity of three mystery trees in his front yard in Macon, Georgia. That same year, his future daughter-in-law, Neva Jane Langley, won the title of Miss America. The trees had been planted by a landscaper who had mistaken them for dogwoods. They were Yoshino cherry trees, not native to Middle Georgia. An avid gardener, Fickling began rooting them. He gave away more than 120,000 trees in his lifetime and became known in the community as "Johnny Cherryseed." The breathtaking blossoms inspired Carolyn Crayton, of the Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful Commission, to start a festival honoring Fickling for his contributions. In his ninth book, The Pinkest Party on Earth, Macon newspaper columnist Ed Grisamore tells the story of how a city wraps itself in pink each spring and has become the cherry blossom capital of the world, with more than 300,000 flowering cherry trees. Book jacket.

Looks at the life cycle of a cherry tree, the history behind the gift of the Japanese cherry trees to our nation's capital, and the association of cherry trees and spring.

A warm, gorgeous exploration of a little girl's experience immigrating to a new country and missing her home and her grandmother, who still lives far away. Sakura's dad gets a new job in America, so she and her parents make the move from their home in Japan. When she arrives in the States, most of all she misses her grandmother and the cherry blossom trees, under which she and her grandmother used to play and picnic. She wonders how she'll ever feel at home in this new place, with its unfamiliar language and landscape. One day, she meets her neighbor, a boy named Luke, and begins to feel a little more settled. When her grandmother becomes ill, though, her family takes a trip back to Japan. Sakura is sad when she returns to the States and once again reflects on all she misses. Luke does his best to cheer her up -- and tells her about a surprise he knows she'll love, but she'll have to wait till spring. In the meantime, Sakura and Luke's friendship blooms and finally, when spring comes, Luke takes her to see the cherry blossom trees flowering right there in her new neighborhood. Sakura's Cherry Blossoms captures the beauty of the healing power of friendship through Weston's Japanese poetry-inspired text and Saburi's breathtaking illustrations.

After World War II, Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i sought to carve a positive niche of public citizenship in the community. In 1953 members of the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce and their wives created a beauty contest, the Cherry Blossom Festival (CBF) Queen Pageant, which quickly became an annual spectacle for the growing urban population of Honolulu. Crowning the Nice Girl analyzes the pageant through its decades of development to the present within multiple frameworks of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. Drawing on extensive archival research; interviews with CBF queens, contestants, and organizers; and participant observation in the Fiftieth Annual Festival as a volunteer, Christine Yano paints a complex portrait of not only a beauty pageant, but also a community. The study begins with the subject of beauty pageants in general and Asian American beauty pageants in particular, interrogating the issues they raise, embedding them within their histories, and examining them as part of a global culture that has taken its model from the Miss America contest.Yano follows the pageant throughout the decades into the 1990s, adding corresponding "herstories"—extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens. She concludes by framing issues of race, ethnicity, spectacle, and community within the intertwined themes of niceness and banality.

Presents the story of Eliza Scidmore, a world traveler, writer, photographer, and peace advocate who, after years of persistence, planted cherry trees all across Washington, D.C.