![]() In 1909, 15 years after the ball, Scidmore’s “time-worn plea,” as she put it, reached the ear of the new first lady, Helen “Nellie” Taft, who was bent on beautifying Washington. “It was as one crying in the wilderness that I begged,” she wrote.Īnd the newspaper report of the ball that evening on New Hampshire Avenue made no mention of her crusade. In Japan, people scrawled poems on paper and hung them in the tree branches.īut in Washington, bureaucrats of three administrations had been unmoved by her pleas and photographs. It is “the most ideally, wonderfully beautiful tree that nature has to show,” she wrote. She is the woman whose love of their beauty sparked the first lobbying campaign to plant Japanese cherry trees at the Tidal Basin - and this month marks the centennial of her efforts realized.Įnchanted by the culture of Japan, by 1894 she had been pestering federal officials for almost a decade to plant some of the gorgeous trees she had seen in Tokyo around Washington’s reclaimed Potomac River mud flats, she would say later. (Photo by Wisconsin Historical Society /PHOTO BY WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY) This image is issued by the Wisconsin Historical Society. ![]() She has a horse-shaped pin at her collar. ![]() UNDATED PHOTO: Three-quarter length portrait in front of a painted backdrop of Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, holding a book. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |