"Originally published in Japan in different form as Cherry Ingram : the English saviour of Japan's cherry blossoms by Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, in 2016. This translation simultaneously published as 'Cherry' Ingram: the Englishman who saved Japan's blossoms in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London"--Colophon.

Translated from the Japanese by the author.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 359-362) and index.

"Collingwood 'Cherry' Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907. So taken with the plant, he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England, where he created a garden of cherry varieties. In 1926, he learned that the Great White Cherry had become extinct in Japan. Six years later, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Express. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than 100 varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe, from Auckland to Washington. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, the narrative follows the flower from its adoption as a national symbol in 794, through its use as an emblem of imperialism in the 1930s, to the present-day worldwide obsession with forecasting the exact moment of the trees' flowering"--