(National Poetry Month, Day 13)

Branch Brook Park, 2013

Did you know that the largest collection of cherry blossom trees in the United States is at Branch Brook Park in Newark, New Jersey?

While the cherry blossoms have just barely begun blooming at Branch Brook, the events of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival are practically all over.

While we wait for the blossoms to flourish fully in the next few days, I invite you to peruse these photos that I’ve taken of the Branch Brook cherry blossoms in recent years, and to enjoy my favorite cherry blossom poem.

Loveliest of Trees
by A. E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.