“Loveliest of Trees,  the Cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide...”

Housman’s haunting poem, part of his Shropshire Lad collection written in 1896, is one of the nation’s favourites.

It has been set to music at least 60 times, most famously by Vaughan Williams. [If you don’t know it click here to hear it recited by Judy Dench  or to hear it sung in a performance by Bryn Terfel]  I was reminded of both the poem and the song on a recent visit to Kew on a lovely sunny day when the cherries were just coming into bloom and standing out against a  bright blue sky.

Of course Housman was thinking of our native “wild” cherry [ Prunus avium] but these days we are fortunate enough also to have hundreds of varieties of ornamental ones, almost all from Japan, China and Korea as well, and I wondered about their history – especially since those countries were largely closed to westerners until the middle of the 19th century – and discovered that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to just one man who introduced many varieties to Britain and in the process saved them in Japan as well.

As usual the photos are my own unless otherwise acknowledged and were mainly taken at Kew or in my own garden

East Asian cherries are quite variable in the wild, and it’s clear that many centuries ago people, especially in Japan, began selecting and cultivating them for their beauty rather than any potential fruit production. Over time, gardeners developed many cultivars with showier flowers—double petals, unusual colours, and graceful forms. However they remained largely a Japanese secret until the forced opening  up of Japan to Western trade in the 1850s, following Commodore Perry’s expedition.

Of course it’s not that ornamental cherries were not known about before then. They had been mentioned by the German naturalist and explorer Englebert Kaempfer in his 1712 book on Japanese plants  where he lists six different sorts, with their Japanese names,  including ones with double flowers and one that was pink, although without any of the  illustrations he added for many other species.  But these were merely short Latin descriptions and clearly no seeds or plants reached the west.  There were other even shorter mentions by  Carl Peter Thunberg in 1784  and Philipp von  Siebold in 1830.

However  a white oriental cherry had reached Britain in 1819 because its gets a write-up in the Transactions of the Horticultural Society in 1830 by  the President, Thomas Andrew Knight. “The Prunus Pseudo-Cerasus, or Chinese Cherry, has been so recently introduced into Europe, and has been hitherto so little propagated, or cultivated, that probably not even its name is known to the greater number of gardeners. It has however properties and qualities, which will render it an acquisition of considerable value; and I am perfectly confident that it has not yet been seen, in this country, nearly in the greatest state of excellence, which it is capable of.” 

We are told in a footnote that “This Cherry was introduced from China by Mr. Samuel Brookes, of Ball’s Pond, in 1819, and he presented a specimen of it in 1822, to the Horticultural Society. It has since, in two instances, been imported from China by the Society, through the assistance of Mr. Reeves…and is known in China by the name of Yung Fo but is only cultivated as an ornamental plant at Canton, where it rarely produces fruit.”  Brookes was not only a Fellow of the Linnaean Society but  clearly an enterprising nurseryman because he had a collector named Jospeh Poole working for him, probably in Canton who sent back a wide range of plants including  the cherry.

The cherry donated to the Horticultural Society was grown indoors at their garden in Chiswick and fruited in 1824 “within fifty days from the time the blossoms opened”. Originally named  Prunus paniculata,  it was later reclassified as Prunus Pseudo-Cerasus, by John Lindley, the Society’s assistant secretary. Under that name it got a single-line mention in the account of the plants encountered or collected during Commodore Perry’s expedition. It might only be a brief note but significantly it said this cherry  was “cultivated everywhere” in Japan.

 

Once Japan had opened its ports to trade plant hunters poured in, although generally they contented themselves with collecting plants from nurseries rather than the wild. Surprisingly cherries were not high on the list of “must-have” plants and  it was really only when the vogue for Japonisme began to take off that interest  grew. Part of the reason for the delay in widespread introduction is that seed grown trees are very variable so unless very small rooted specimens could be transplanted and sent, specific varieties have to be grafted. Given the long journey times from Japan the scions proved difficult to keep alive en route, a problem not solved until well into the next century.

It also did not help that many westerners still thought that cherries were essentially fruit trees, which led to Lindley naming  these ornamentals  Prunus pseudo-cerasus or  false cherries.  Many still took some convincing but how could you not be convinced by the sentiments of Lafcadio Hearn, the Japanophile writer, who really caught the public imagination when he wrote that  “as I see before me a Grove of cherry trees covered with something unutterably beautiful – a dazzling mist of snowy blossoms clinging like summer cloud-fleece about every branch and twig; and the ground beneath them and the path before me, is white with the soft, thick odorous snow of fallen petals.”  [Glimpses of Old Japan, 1895]

So who was the Englishman who helped bring the cherry to greater attention?  He was Collingwood Ingram who had been born into a wealthy political and publishing family in 1880. They were also somewhat eccentric, having a collection of albino birds which lived inside the house as well as 30 Japanese Chin dogs, and a gnu which lived in the garden of their house  at Westgate-on-Sea.  As he grew up Collingwood became passionate about natural history, especially birds and became a keen ornithologist. He  had two older brothers who were all influenced by Japonisme. They probably saw The Mikado, visited the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge  and read Tales of Old Japan by Algernon Freeman-Mitford, later Lord Redesdale, who was to create the Japanese inspired garden at Batsford Park in the Cotswolds. These must have influenced his decision in 1902 to  visit Japan for just a couple of weeks  as part of a trip to Australia. He immediately fell in love with the country and its people. After he married in 1906 he took his wife Florence there for their honeymoon in 1907.

He served with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War and when it was over he bought The Grange in Benenden, a  half timbered mansion  built in 1893 for the Earl of Cranbrook.  When the couple moved in there was no garden to speak of, so he decided to create an English country garden with  “a succession of Sylvan Glades”.

There was however just two items of special interest, ornamental cherry trees probably planted in the late 1890s by the previous owner when cherry trees from Asia were still a rarity. When the delicate pink blossoms appeared in the spring of 1920  he wrote “it would be difficult to conceive a more striking floral display.”  It started a new passion equalling and then supplanting ornithology and he decided to collect as many varieties of ornamental cherries as he could find.

There was of course a difference between collecting them and knowing about them. There were about 100 different wild species of cherry trees growing around the world mainly in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere including 10 sorts in Japan but nowhere else apart from Japan had anyone carried out any serious cultivation or hybridisation which produced an abundance of over 400 different sorts.

The new “modernising” Japanese government was determined that the west should know more about their country and culture  so they enthusiastically took part in international exhibitions and world fairs including Vienna in 1873, Chicago 1893, Paris 1900, and London in 1910. This was cherry blossom diplomacy and it was widespread commercially too, with  the Yokohama Nursery Company opening branches in San Francisco in 1890,  New York in 1898 and  London in 1907. Ingram bought direct from them but he was also beginning to build a network of cherry-loving friends round the world to swap varieties. Some came Kew where W.J. Bean had planted the first cherries in the early 1900s, others  from the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. He also swapped  seeds with, amongst others,  Stephenson Clark of Borde Hill.

One exchange was to prove very significant. In 1923 Ingram visited Winchelsea to meet Annie Freeman and her husband George. They had a cherry with very large snow-white blossoms up to 6cm  across and with abnormally long leaves. Ingram recognised “the rarity and remarkable beauty of this variety” and took home a few scions for grafting.   When a Japanese friend arrived in 1925 and saw the young tree in flower he dubbed it the great white cherry – “Tai-Haku”.

By 1925 Ingram had been at The Grange for six years and already collected  70 Cherry varieties in his garden. He was  also able  to get his first notable paper “Notes on Japanese Cherries” published in the RHS Journal.

 

It began  “Although the Japanese ornamental Cherries are among the most beautiful of all flowering trees, they are still strangely neglected in English and European gardens; indeed only a very small proportion of the known varieties can now be obtained in this country. There can be but one explanation for this apparent indifference:the almost hopeless confusion that now exists with regard to their nomenclature.”  Even when collections were imported directly from Japan, and clearly labelled, the confusion could still arise because “in my experience it is the nearest chance if plants have been correctly named. And if plants of the same variety of coming into this country and half a dozen different Japanese names, how are we to know what to call it?“

To make matters worse there had been two attempts to describe and identify the various species and varieties, published only a few weeks apart in 1916. Of course they were not identical! First Manaubu Myoshi published a well-illustrated  article in The Journal of the College of Science, Imperial University of Tokyo covering 133 different sorts, and  a few weeks  Ernest Henry Wilson  published The Cherries of Japan for the Arnold Arboretum. On top of that English nurseries often changed the names to make them more appealing so everything became a classification nightmare.

Ingram  now felt that  to become a real cherry expert he needed to return  to Japan again which he did, reaching  Nagasaki on the 30th of March 1927 and leaving just seven weeks later “veiled in tears”. Whilst there he collected new cherry varieties both in the wild and from nurseries and gardens,  met the top Cherry experts including the people at Yokohama nursery,  as well as  key players in the newly emergent industrial power.  It was soon clear to him that Japan was changing and not for the better.

Not only was modernisation changing what the country looked  like with “old oriental towns wiped out” replaced by “ultra Occidental buildings of great size and hideous” but political power was shifting. From western-aligned enlightened monarchy  the country was moving towards aggressive nationalism and militarism, with cherry blossom being used as an emblem on the insignia of the country’s armed forces. Poems and propaganda linked the beautiful fragility of the blooms to the fragility of life serving the emperor. At the same time there had been a loss of variety in the cherries planted with one particular variety -Somei-yoshino – dominating, and becoming associated with the new regime.

For more on this see Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarisation of Aesthetics in Japanese History by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 2002

There was, however, one upside. He met Seisaku  Funatsu a cherry expert who showed him a scroll painting of “the cherry that my great grandfather painted more than 130 years ago” and told him  “we used to see it near Kyoto but it seems to be extinct. I can’t find it anywhere anymore.” To his amazement Ingram recognised it, and not only that but was able to reassure Funatsu that it had not disappeared entirely and that he had one in his own garden.  Its was of course  Tai-Haku.  Funatsu was “clearly incredulous, but his good manners forbad any expression of doubt.”

His reputation was such that even by this stage Ingram  had been invited to speak to  Sakura no Kai  [the Cherry Association] in Tokyo. After giving them something of  a hard time:  “why is it that your flowering cherries often seem to do better in England than in their native country?” and  “I would like to confess to a feeling of disappointment with regard to the size and conditions of some of the cherry trees going in your parks and other places. He later wrote his  shyness and fear were “completely dissipated as soon as I discovered, by the vacant expressions on their faces, that my audience evidently did not understand a single word of what I was saying !”

On a more positive note he told them about two varieties growing  at The Grange which he had not been able to find in Japan. One was a double pink variety named Daikoku and the other was, of course Tai-Haku, the great white cherry. He promised them to return them to their native home.  “If  I am able to restore these to your country, it will indeed be a proud moment for me, and I will feel that I have repaid with small mite the wealth of beauty my garden has derived from your lovely country.”   The reintroduction of these two varieties and the survival any others at risk of disappearing in Japan became his mission once he returned home.

Over the next few years The Grange became a cherry blossom trading post. Scions arrived from all over Japan, usually kept alive by soggy moss packed around the base of each piece. Ingram grafted  them onto native cherries and planted them for later propagation. However his attempts to return Tai-Haku were not so successful, and for the first five years all his consignments arrived dead at least in part  because they were sent via a sea-route route through the tropics. However in 1932 he hit on a new plan, sending the scions pushed into small potatoes to provide moisture, via the Trans-Siberian railway.  This worked and Tai-Haku returned to Japan. It is now widespread  including what is thought to be the world’s largest planting at Alnwick Castle.

Ingram now turned his attention to hybridising cherries, something which had not been done before in Britain which he wrote about in writing about them in A Garden of Memories in 1970. It was he said “not only the most inexpensive but also the most exciting form of gambling I know – a game of chance with a stakes concerned are no more than the common currency of every gardener – time and trouble.”

He had considerable success, introducing about 54 new varieties, with 15 receiving the Award of Garden Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society, notably Okame and Kursar, which he wrote about in A Garden of Memories in 1970.

But don’t think he loved all cherries. Some he barely tolerated because they were a necessary part of his collection. He particularly loathed the popular vibrantly coloured Kanzan,  which “flaunts it finery with nauseating frequency… The eye quickly becomes tired of the aggressive beauties of these cherries… They have been planted in tens of thousands as roadside plants across the south of England.. an inexcusable violation of the native scene.”

After the war  Ingram published  Ornamental Cherries (1948) using is own illustrations, which made his name much more widely known across the gardening world and has become a classic text, although unfortunately it’s not available on-line.

He continued to contribute  to gardening journals,  and to develop his garden in Benenden, and his network of cherry lovers. He carried on travelling widely, recording his travels in journals and sketchbooks which are still held by family.[see further reading below]

Long known as “Cherry” Ingram he was 100 when he died in 1981.

 

I could easily have written twice as much about this extraordinary character, but others have covered much of the ground much more thoroughly than me so I hope you’ll go and discover more about him for yourself. Suggested starting points below

I leave you with the last lines of the Housman poem as I head off to my garden where

“About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”

Happy Easter!

 

For more information good places to start are The family-run website about Ingram;   The website of The Grange, which includes information about the garden today including aa short video and lots of images; The Frustrated Gardener blog;   Wybe Kuitert’s  Japanese Flowering Cherries, 1999;   A wonderful edited pdf version of his 1926 Travel Journal for Japan  with lots of his own photos.

For a  longer read,  his life and achievements have been well captured in 2019 in  Cherry Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossom by Naoko Abe. She has also recorded lectures and interviews about Ingram and her book, which can be found on YouTube

You might also enjoy London’s Cherry Blossom. Beauty and History, Joy at Your Fingertips, By Annegret Schopp-O’Dwyer (2021)