History in bloom

One hundred years ago, in 1925, the mayors of Yokohama and Kobe presented 500 Ojochin cherry trees to the Vancouver Park Board in honour of Japanese-Canadian veterans of WWI. The cherry trees were planted around the Cenotaph Memorial in Stanley Park, and marked the start of cherries in Vancouver.

Today, there are around 43,000 cherry trees in Vancouver. The history of the city’s cherry trees — fascinating in its own right — has been written about, such as in Nina Shoroplova’s A Legacy of Trees, which focuses on the history of cherry trees at Stanley Park, and Fiona Tinwei Lam’s piece on the Uyedas, a family who donated 1,000 cherry trees in 1935 only to later become some of the 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forcibly interned during WWII.

Lesser known, however, is the history of cherry trees at UBC.

The oldest cherry trees on campus are likely at Nitobe Memorial Garden. Fifty trees were shipped over from Japan as a symbol of Japanese-Canadian friendship for the garden’s opening in June 1960. Of this generation — found mostly in Nitobe but also on the Place Vanier stretch between Lower Mall and University Boulevard — there are likely 45 cherry trees left today, according to Associate Director of UBC Botanical Garden Douglas Justice.

The other cherry trees on campus were planted in subsequent waves in the 1970s and 1980s, such as those on West Mall nearest the Kenny Building. The cherry trees from the 1960s are mostly from Japan, but, according to Justice, in the mid-1970s the Department of Agriculture introduced strict importation rules over virus fears; cherry trees have since been sourced from inside Canada.

The cherry trees' history at UBC is not limited to waves of planting: cherry trees have also often been cut down in favour of campus infrastructure. Justice said the path beside Beaty Biodiversity Museum used to have some, as did the path between Swing Space and Main Mall, before the Earth and Ocean Sciences building opened in 2012. Most saddening, perhaps, is the three cherry trees that lived on the grassy hill southwest of the old Student Union Building (SUB). According to Justice, the three great white Taihaku cherry trees were planted when the old SUB opened in September 1968, but were cut down in 2015 to make way for the Nest.

If the history of cherry trees on the main campus seems like an unpleasant combination of infrequent planting and too-frequent chopping, then the south campus provides more hope, or at least a sense of thoughtfulness and consideration.

In 1973, a plot of cherry trees near the UBC Farm was planted and co-managed by the Faculty of Agriculture, the BC Landscape Plant Improvement Association Orchard and the BC Nursery Trades Association. Justice said the Faculty of Agriculture used to run field schools at the cherry plot, with students deflowering some ornamental cherries to protect the fruit cherries from pollen-borne viruses.

Justice said thermotherapy was also practised at the south campus cherry plot — a method used to propagate cherry cultivars that are virus-indexed. Cultivars are a variety of a given plant produced by breeding, with virus indexing being a process of determining whether a tree has a virus through a combination of ‘test’ and ‘indicator’ plants. The Trades Association in particular would graft from the cherry orchard onto their stock to then sell throughout the province.

Of the 10 rows originally planted at the south campus plot, there is now only a single one left. This row, those on campus and those in Vancouver more generally, said Justice, all remain at risk from viruses and infrastructure projects.

And yet, hope remains. There has been a nascent focus on conserving our cherry trees. Justice said he was one of the only people interested in urban forestry or dendrology and epidemiology at UBC in the 1990s. Today, however, the Faculty of Forestry has an urban forestry department, and he notes an increasing interest in cherry trees amongst the community, such as The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival (VCBF) founded in 2005.

Douglas himself has documented 55 cherry cultivars across Vancouver, and has tried to propagate all of them. There is still work to be done — Douglas laments the loss of three cherry cultivars that could not be propagated, and that there is not enough funding to be able to virus index cherries at the Botanical Garden. With the CFIA’s importation rules still in place, it is likely those three cherry cultivars will be lost, and Vancouver, come spring, will be that little bit less bright.

First online May 25, 2025, 9:47 p.m.