Cherry Blossom

Spectacular blossom outside the laboratory where I worked for 41 years until my retirement. The window of my former office is towards the end on the third floor, just over this cherry tree. (And one of my experimental laboratories is behind the first two or three windows on the right on the second floor).

These trees were planted when our building was put up in the 1940s (completed 1941). This brief history of the department has a photograph showing the facade when it was brand new.

For me, the blooming of the cherry trees has been a delight each Spring that I have looked out of my office. That the trees hav survived so long is a bit of luck. They have often been under threat of destruction by building works intended to 'improve' our facilities. In the last few years, they have been saved by the recession, because a completely new building for us was on the cards (and fully planned), but that new work has been put off indefinitely by the present financial climate.

The line of cherries, some with white blossom, and some with pink, extends on either side of the main entrance along the entire frontage of the building. I took another picture, to balance my main one, of pink blossom to the right (south) f the entrance.

I cannot properly end this description of the cherries without quoting A E Housman's famous poem "Loveliest of Trees" Housman was an alumnus of my Cambridge college, also famous for its avenues of cherries, and this poem was one of my mother's favourites. My main problem is that "... of my threescore years and ten/Twenty will not come again" is badly out. MORE THAN three score and ten will not come again... Housman could say "And take from seventy springs a score,/It only leaves me fifty more." I wonder how many more I have!

II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

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.