On Wandering, Cherry Trees, Mother’s Day, and Rot

A legacy of activism disappears beneath a day of saccharine platitudes; an era-defining etiquette is exposed as apocrypha; a fairy-tale wedding leads to just another failed marriage.

 
On my first Mother’s Day, I sat beneath a cherry tree and wept. I had been alone for a month; my wife had taken a job out of town and had asked us not to come. “I need to focus,” she’d said.

But I could not focus, at least not on anything besides my exhaustion. I did not know that it was the centennial celebration of the year Mother’s Day was declared a national holiday. I did not know how or why the astonishing pink trees above me had come to embroider New York City’s parks, or that this would be one of the last years the earth remained cool enough for their blossoms to linger into May.

What I did know was that for seven months, I had been covered in breastmilk and urine and spit-up, my clothes stained and stretched and ill-fitting. I had not showered in days. (I had not showered in weeks.) A polar vortex winter had come and gone, shattering two centuries of records with its bitter low, and now it was spring and still I felt unmade. Half-formed.

Later I would be diagnosed with severe postpartum anxiety and depression. Later, people would marvel that I survived how I did for so long. But that first spring, I knew none of this. What I knew was that there was no money for childcare, no insurance for medical treatment, and no partner for support. Every day I got out of bed and held the baby, held the baby, held the baby, and did all the things. And when it was too much, when I thought I would crumble under the stress and the exhaustion and the loneliness, when the rage was so sharp I was terrified I would throw that baby across the room, I did the only thing I knew. I went outside.

It has always been this way for me. When my daughter was three days old, I defied my bedrest orders and climbed the single flight of stairs leading to the building roof. I was explicitly not supposed to do this, but I thought I might die if I didn’t feel the sun, just for a few minutes, shining on my face. Never had I known a pain so deep I couldn’t heal it with the sky.

And so on my first Mother’s Day, I packed a lunch and a couple of toys and brought my daughter to the New York Botanical Garden—the happiest place I knew. I walked through miles of flowers, my daughter tucked against my chest in a brightly woven Girasol wrap that obscured how smudged and translucent I had become underneath.

Everything was in bloom—everywhere sun, and fresh air, and perseverance. I spread a blanket under a grove of bowing trees, cherry blossoms drifting like purple snow onto our laps. The baby giggled in the soft grass as I looked at the blush of fragrant flowers, and cried.

More than 40,000 ornamental cherry trees grace the walking paths of New York City. Yet somehow I had lived 30 years without knowing a single thing about them.

In the years after that first broken spring, I made a game of visiting as many cherry trees as I could during each brief season of bloom. It is not an exaggeration to say that these wanderings kept me alive. To visit each burgeoning tree was like dunking in a stream of new-formed snowmelt, a sharp awakening exquisite in its fleeting immersion. There were favorites to be greeted—the weeping Higan tilting like a windmill in Fort Tryon Park; the delicate white Yoshinos overlooking the lake on Cherry Hill; the opulent line of double-blossomed Kanzan unspooling like a string of purple pearls along the east bank of the Reservoir—and endless new delights to be discovered. The game required me to visit at least one new section of the city and find some place—some tree—I had not yet seen in any season.

I made these outings on my own, a copy of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Interior and a volume of his collected haikus for a guide, my daughter strapped in a carrier, or, later, walking alongside me as my second child rooted and grew. As I wandered, I searched out the stories behind the undulating branches of these ancient trees.

The word hanami was first used by the Japanese novelist Murasaki Shikibu to describe the practice of flower watching. It began in the eighth century, modeled after the Chinese practice of observing plum blossoms, and by the ninth century it had grown into an exuberance of picnics and open-air celebrations under the sakura. Hanami are festivals of evanescence. No single cherry blooms for more than one week, and the transience of the blossoms invites meditation on the ephemeral: birth and death, beauty and violence, sweetness and impermanence.

The most famous cherry trees in the U.S. owe their presence to protolesbian wunderkind Eliza Scidmore, the first female writer, photographer, and board member of the National Geographic Society, who fell in love with the trees while in Japan and campaigned for decades to bring avenues of cherries to the Potomac. In 1909, Eliza secured the allegiance of First Lady Helen Taft and brokered an offer of 2,000 trees, to be given as a formal gift to the United States by the City of Tokyo. In 1912, a ceremonial planting of the first two trees was held on the north bank of the Tidal Basin by the First Lady and Iwa Chinda, the wife of the Japanese ambassador, with Eliza, the only private citizen, in proud attendance.

The trees of New York City are less exalted than their southern brethren, but their pedigree is just as venerable. They too were a gift from Japan to the U.S., sent in 1909 for the Hudson-Fulton celebration—yet another piece of this city’s history I knew nothing about. This 18-day citywide extravaganza marked both the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s “discovery” of the eponymous river, and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s debut of the first commercial paddle steamer in America. 2,500 trees were sent for the maritime celebration, but in a twist of irony, they were lost at sea. A replacement gift arrived in 1912, and the city’s year-end report declared they were “planted in Central Park and Riverside Park in masses, and all were thriving at the close of the season.”

I search for these trees, these centurion ancients whose needlelace blossoms my great-great-grandmothers might have seen. There is something steadying in the thought that a sight so fleet and temporal might yet stretch back so far, their clouds of petals the gathered memories of past and present both.

“A hundred years!” Bashō wrote. “All here in the garden in these fallen leaves.”

I didn’t know it then, but while I searched through cherry groves and wisps of poems for a promise of renewal, my wife was steadily cultivating her own more personal practice of non-attachment.

My wife has left town again. Having a family is hard, she tells me. She wants her life to be easy.

That Mother’s Day overlaps with cherry blossom season is only by chance. Mother’s Day, in its modern form, was established by a woman named Anna Jarvis in memory of her own mother, Anne Reeves Jarvis, who died in the second week of May in 1905.

The elder Anne may never have seen a cherry tree, but she was well acquainted with motifs of renewal and loss. She gave birth to 13 children and buried nine of them before they reached adulthood. Her first son died when her second child was only a few weeks old; by 1858, she had buried two of her five children before their third birthdays. Pregnant for the sixth time, Anne began organizing groups she called Mothers’ Day Work Clubs, which attempted to address the region’s horrific infant and maternal mortality rates by sharing information on hygiene and sanitation. The clubs distributed medicine, taught women how to inspect their food and bottled milk for contamination, and even hired women to help care for families in which the mother was ill.

Although epidemics claimed the lives of one in five children before their fifth birthday, little was understood about how these diseases spread, or what the best steps for prevention might be. Germ theory had not yet reached the Americas, and the scientific discovery of a virus was still half a century away. Sickness was blamed on miasma, foul smells, environmental contagions, and “constitutional defects” (the latter most often when an illness affected anyone besides a well-off white man). Such contradictory opinions and ever-shifting advice made it nearly impossible to learn effective mitigation strategies to protect against disease. Yet Anne refused to accept that endless death was the inherent cost of motherhood, and she devoted her life to uniting women in outward-facing service for the betterment of their greater community.

Anne’s daughter Anna was not a mother; she did not envision, and in fact actively campaigned against, the idea of her holiday as one which empowered or supported actual living mothers, going so far as to attack charities who dared use the day to raise money to improve maternal and infant health. In Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for the Control of Mother’s Day, Katharine Lane Antolini details Anna’s ferocious quest to limit the holiday to people honoring “the great sacrifices of their own, individual mother.” Note here the use of mother, singular: Anna was characteristically obsessive about controlling the placement of the apostrophe—it was Mother’s Day, and never Mothers’ Day—and went so far as to take out patents on the phrases “Mother’s Day” and “second Sunday in May,” suing any who dared co-opt the words.

Anna also registered a copyright for the emblem of a white carnation, her mother’s favorite flower. She extolled its symbolic “mother-virtues” of purity, fidelity, charity, and love, and worked to make the flower inseparable from the conceit of Mother’s Day. Antolini recounts Anna waxing rhapsodic during a press interview: “The carnation does not drop its petals, but hugs them to its heart as it dies, and so, too, mothers hug their children to their hearts, their mother love never dying.”

It’s instructive to consider that Anne Reeves Jarvis would have hated her daughter’s navel-gazing zeal. It never seemed to occur to Anna that what mothers, singular and plural, undoubtedly wanted more than carnations, hugs, or memorials was to prevent all that unnecessary dying in the first place.

A century after Anne’s proselytizing created so frenetic a demand for Mother’s Day carnations that it caused the floral industry to run out of stock, the cherry trees in New York City once again fan open in their brief season of bloom. In our park families sit warily beneath the sprawling trees. “Is it Safe to Send Flowers for Mother’s Day?” the top trending article in my newsfeed asks as a police car drives slowly past the lawn, its roof speakers blaring orders to maintain the mandated six feet of space.

It is the sixth week of Covid lockdown. Six weeks of endless sirens. Six weeks of fear, and sickness, and crushing, obliterating sadness. My wife has left town again. Having a family is hard, she tells me. She wants her life to be easy. Six weeks, so far, of mothering endlessly alone.

Every day is too much. Every day I am unmade again. We go outside and there are too many people, not distancing, not properly masked. My two-year-old touches everything, and my six-year-old fiddles incessantly with her mask, and the panic attack that sits always now inside my hands and stomach moves into my lungs, suffocating. Every choice feels like the wrong choice.

In his daily briefing the governor warns the pandemic could last another two months. I find a floral alphabet book on the back of a shelf and begin a roving scavenger hunt to see how many letters we can discover in the gardens: azalea, bluebell, candytuft, daffodil; echinacea, foxglove, geranium, hydrangea—following their emergence like a trail of breadcrumbs that might guide us out of the purgatory of this pandemic.

Everywhere there are the gifts of spring, riotous, relentless. Here are the trees, newly green; here is the sun, shining. Here are cavalcades of flowers; air that tastes like renewal, though it carries death on its wings.

In Central Park, a field hospital is set up in the East Meadow. Two Kanzan cherry trees stand sentinel as the lawn fills with field stretchers, steel barricades, giant white isolation tents. Yellow air ducts swoop between them in a surreal echo of the bright-hued slides of the city’s shuttered playgrounds. For the first time since I have become a mother, I do not go to see the trees.

This is not the first time this park has been used as a field hospital. During the Civil War, the vacant buildings of St. Vincent’s Academy were donated for use as a military hospital. Run by the same Sisters of Charity who staffed St. Vincent’s hospital downtown, the U.S. General Hospital Central Park opened in the autumn of 1862 a mere half-mile north of the East Meadow, with the capacity to treat 250 men. Patients with contagious diseases were housed outdoors in isolation tents, eerie antecedents to the ones currently mushrooming across the grounds. 

Nor were nuns the only women pressed into medical service during the war. Anne’s home in western Virginia was at the epicenter of the fighting, her town surrounded by embattled troops on all sides. Waves of typhoid, diphtheria, and measles deluged the country; nearly half a million soldiers would die of disease and infection, twice the number that would be killed in actual battle. In was common for soldiers to be left lying in the field for days for want of aid, bodies piling up much faster than they could be buried.

The Mothers’ Day Work Clubs took on the mantle of field nurses and refused to declare a political alliance, ministering to soldiers from both armies for the duration of the war. But the scourges of pestilence did not contain themselves within the camps. By the war’s end in 1865, Anne had carried three new pregnancies and buried five more children, four of them in a single year. It is believed that all five children died of infections from the same epidemics ravaging the armies.

In the second month of Covid lockdown, refrigerated trucks housing mobile morgues throng the streets around the hospitals as surging death tolls overwhelm the city. There is a new death every two minutes, 800 new deaths a day, and hospitals use forklifts to move the bodies anywhere they can find space. There is talk of mass burials, parks turned to cemeteries for the growing legions of the unclaimed dead.

We have followed our scavenger hunt all the way to “zinnia,” and while our flower identification skills have improved immensely, my children are bored with classifying. They are restless, and hungry for stories. In that bleak first winter of new motherhood, besieged by edicts to read nightly or risk ruining your baby, I had bypassed Sandra Boynton and Dr. Seuss and read aloud from a weather-beaten copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Immobilized now by a different kind of isolation, I find myself reaching back for those tales, for the old, dark stories of transformation.

We traipse through daffodils and play in bowers thick with hyacinth and crocus while I tell of Persephone and Hades, Narcissus and Echo, Apollo, Zephyrus, and Hermes. Spring disrupts the monotony of confinement, upends our senses. Reality shifts to surreality in overlapping fractals, as though we are living inside a kaleidoscope.

In the Little Free Library box, someone has left a glossy new art book. Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Victorian Language of Flowers, it says in letterpress font across intricately rendered cuttings of bluebell, anemone, cornflower, and iris. Datura and apple blossoms wreathe the image of a board stamped with the artist’s name, Jessica Roux, on the tail.

“From hyssop to larkspur, lavender to thistle, discover the secret meanings behind an alluring array of flowers and herbs.” I lift it out with a plastic bag, drench it with Lysol and leave it sitting in the hall for two days before finally agreeing to read it to my children. We still knew little about how this virus spread.

“The Victorian language of flowers—also called floriography—emerged as a clandestine method of communication at a time when proper etiquette discouraged open and flagrant displays of emotion—” I want to read more, but my children grab the book and skip ravenously through its pages. It is secrets they are after.

When we were first dating, my wife picked me flowers every day. They were wild-ish flowers, the exuberant blooms that tumbled over fences or sprawled off the edges of lawns in the Edenic paradise of East Hollywood, where it is legal to pick fruit or flowers that grow beyond a private yard: roses, bougainvillea, mimosa, penstemon, beach aster, ranunculus. Nearly all of them were new to me, a continent removed from the plants of my mid-Atlantic adolescence. I was delighted to receive them, and never thought to ascribe to them any meaning beyond thoughtfulness.

Employing a more modern cipher, I download books from the New York Public Library which my children cannot steal away. I learn that the first widely-used flower dictionary was Le Langage des Fleurs, published in 1819 by Louise Cortambert under the nom de plum Madame Charlotte de LaTour, and that its release set off the kind of publishing madness that might lead to the making of a theme park if it were replicated today.

 In The Language of Flowers: A History, Beverly Seaton suggests these floral dictionaries comprised a kind of symbolic vocabulary list relating to the conduct of a love affair. They entered the zeitgeist in 1763, when The Turkish Embassy Letters, the collected writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, introduced the West to the “secret harem language” of sélam. A feminist poet and the wife of the English Ambassador to Turkey, Lady Mary’s memoirs described “Turkish Love-letters,” handfuls of objects wrapped in a handkerchief and passed between lovers. “There is no color, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble or feather that has not a verse belonging to it; and you may quarrel, reproach, or send Letters of passion… without ever inking your fingers.”

Although her descriptions of sélam were romanticized misapprehensions—it was no symbolic code at all, but rather a rhyming game more akin to cockney riddles than to botanical haiku—they would kick off a craze that would define the next 150 years. Romie Stott writes of the obsession in Atlas Obscura: “Harems were sexy; flowers were sexy; secret messages between lovers were extra sexy. The public wanted in.”

As befits a language used in courtship, the encoded sentiments of floriography were often complex. Both color and number were enriddled with meaning, and definitions might change based on their context or combination: snapdragons could signify presumption or be a charm against falsehoods; the bright blue hyacinth scattered through the tulips could mean jealousy, sorrow, or eternal love. When sent together, the two might mean, “I’m sorry for making a mistake,” or “Your love is a lie and gives me death.”

With an exuberance born from months of compressed boredom, my children apply this new semiotics to all kinds of objects. Rocks mean “come find me,” acorns mean “go hide.” Their meanings change constantly, subject only to whimsy. I learn that this capriciousness is actually quite historically sound.

“Floriography was the pre-digital version of emoji,” quips Stott. “Like any symbol-based code, part of the appeal was deniability.” With hundreds of floral dictionaries in circulation, many in direct contradiction with one another, the ability to suggest one thing then zealously deny such intentions was rife for exploitation.

I listen to my children whispering about spies and secret messages and consider the missive I might compile for my wife: meadowsweet and columbine, buttercups and pansies, hellebore mixed with blood red dahlias. Uselessness, abandonment, childishness, anger, calumny, betrayal… It is comforting, really, to consider that the language of heartbreak has maintained such specificity and nuance over time.

On Mother’s Day, my sisters meet us at the park with a bag of gifts and a giant bouquet of carnations. It is the ninth week of lockdown, and the first time we have seen them—seen anyone—in months. My son digs through the pile of new books and hands me Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

Anna Jarvis would have loved this story, I think as each page reveals yet another arboreal sacrifice: first the leaves, then the apples, the branches, and even the very trunk, until nothing remains but a thankless boy and a stump.

“And the tree was happy…” the book concludes. I have some doubts.

“Again!” my son squeals.

“Let’s walk through the garden instead.” I gather our things and remove my son from my lap. I am suddenly not in the mood to be perched on. I hand him the flowers and leave the book face down in the dirt.

Before Anna declared it the official flower of Mother’s Day, the carnation was beloved by the Victorians for flower-flirting. By the 18th century it had been cultivated into more than 350 known varietals, and it could be found everywhere, adorning hats and bodices, brightening breakfast trays, or worn as a buttonhole flower or in a boutonnière vase on a gentleman’s lapel. When arranged in a nosegay, each color conveyed a different meaning: dark red for ardor; pink for lasting affection; white for pure love; yellow for disdain; striped for rejection; purple for caprice.

I revise my earlier mental bouquet and consider how deliciously satisfying it would feel to deliver an enormous bushel of striped carnations, one hundred stems bound up into the ultimate passive-aggressive burn, like a Victorian-era NeNe meme: Girl, bye.

When I share this with my sister she rolls her eyes. “You should just tell her she’s a selfish cunt.” Instead I pick up my phone and send a careful email to my prodigal wife:

Some things I needed to hear today: I love you. I am grateful for you. I appreciate you taking care of our children. I am sure this day is hard for you, and I want you to know that I am thinking about you and the kids. Here are some flowers. Whatever happens with our marriage, I will always appreciate and respect you as a mother. Thank you for all you do for our family. 

If none of these things are true anymore, I wish you would be honest and say that to me. If they are true, I wish you could understand how important it is to me to hear you say them. How little I feel them. And how unseen and unloved I have felt for so long. 

There are stories you believe you know, tropes you have spent a lifetime living alongside without ever offering them your full attention: the sanctity of motherhood; the guarantee of spring; the promise of happily ever after. Here is what you learn when you dig these legends out by the root, separate the original rhizome from its metastatic growth.

While reading about cherries, I find a wrinkle in the origin story of America’s favorite trees. In The Sakura Obsession, Naoko Abe mentions that Tokyo mayor Yukio Osaka sent Helen Taft and Eliza Scidmore their 2,000 trees not in 1912, but in 1909. However, “this first shipment of cherry trees proved to be infested with insects, and American plant-quarantine officials had to incinerate them.” Some googling reveals the trees were not only infested, but consumed by rot, so diseased that President Taft ordered them burned in great bonfires like floral funeral pyres on the National Mall. Despite the potential for serious diplomatic offense, Japan responded with a gift of three times as many trees, shipping 6,020 meticulously prepared saplings to Seattle, where they were divided into refrigerated train cars and sent off, half to D.C., and the other half to New York City—the replacement for the 2,500 trees lost at sea.

Trawling for more intel about this shared-yet-never-mentioned legacy, I find uglier stories quietly elided from the National Park Service’s official history of the cherry trees. In 1941, two days after the U.S. declared war on Japan, four cherry trees were hacked down on the west side of the Tidal Basin, To Hell with the Japanese! scrawled across one ragged stump. In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in the oldest Japanese garden in a public arboretum in the U.S., a Shinto shrine was burned to the ground.

In 1942, while an executive order was forcibly relocating 120,000 Americans with Japanese ancestry into internment camps, papers across the country reported floods of letters demanding that all cherry trees be torn up, chopped down, burned to the ground. The National Cherry Festival was suspended for five years; the Park Service declared the trees would be known as “Oriental cherries” from then on. The Brooklyn garden was renamed the “Oriental Garden” and remained closed until 1950.

Cherries are not the only flower whose popular story has eclipsed bitter sorrow among its shoots. Just a few years after succeeding in establishing Mother’s Day as a national holiday, Anna Jarvis pivoted and devoted the rest of her life to eradicating aspects of the holiday that had grown beyond her control. Her beloved carnations became a source of bitter acrimony. The floral industry had immediately seen the profit potential in the holiday, and within four years they had driven up the price of carnations 3,000 percent, from half a cent in 1908 to 15 cents per stem in 1912. By the early 1920s a single stem cost a full dollar. When the demand for white carnations exceeded the supply, the florists pivoted seamlessly—they had a century of experience in flower language. Red carnations became the flower for living mothers, and white a memorial for the deceased.

Their profiteering enraged Anna, but so did the charities who used the holiday to raise money for women and children in need. In 1925 local papers reported that Anna was removed by the police, “dragged kicking and screaming” from a fundraiser by the American War Mothers and arrested for disturbing the peace. She wrote vicious screeds denigrating activists, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt among them, for their “crafty plotting” in appropriating her holiday to raise money for the maternal health of the poor. In the end her legal battles left her penniless. She died in a mental asylum, alone and destitute, reportedly declaring she was sorry she had ever started Mother’s Day.

Even floriography turns out to be lie. “How much did 19th-century people actually use the language of flowers?” Seaton asks. “The fact is, I have not been able to document much actual use.” Floral dictionaries, she posits, were in essence coffee table books for the idle rich and were never used as more than a passing amusement. Modern writers have made a mythology of this “secret language” in just the way Lady Mary did the sélam. “The history of our popular culture,” Seaton gripes, “needs to be studied and written by trained scholars, not left to the casual hobbyist or amateur.”

A legacy of activism disappears beneath a day of saccharine platitudes; an era-defining etiquette is exposed as apocrypha; a fairy-tale wedding leads to just another failed marriage. Sometimes finding the true story requires burning the rot and starting over. Sometimes the clearest message is no message at all. My wife is gone for eleven straight weeks. She never responds to my email.

That childhood and cherry blossoms are fleeting are both well-worn clichés; the unforeseen twist was my realization that for some people, so is motherhood.

Nearly a decade has passed since my first Mother’s Day. The cherry trees drop their petals earlier and earlier each year; this spring, they blossomed in March. Experts warn that if winter temperatures continue to rise, in the span of my children’s lifetime, the cherry blossoms may be entirely gone. That childhood and cherry blossoms are fleeting are both well-worn clichés; the unforeseen twist was my realization that for some people, so is motherhood.

My wife returns for a few weeks in the summer of 2020 before she leaves for good. She moves across the country, fills her Instagram feed with pictures of multi-state joyrides and graffiti sprees. That spring she posts a picture of her new e-bike parked in a field of flowers, captioned: “If you live in Texas, you know about the obligatory ‘loved one in bluebonnets’ seasonal photo!” It has been seven months— 11 months— 16 months since she has seen her children.

“The wandering crow”, writes Bashō, “finds only plum blossoms where its nest had been.” “Spring passes and the birds cry out—tears in the eyes of fishes.”

Below, highlighted in purple, three lines of emphasis drawn down the tattered margin: “Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.”

In the third spring of a pandemic predicted to last four weeks, I return at last to the cherry trees. It has been two full years since my wife left while denying she was leaving. My children are well-acclimated to their masks now, to their many kinds of distancing. They race with glee through a soft mist of petals and return proffering handfuls of pilfered flowers. I don’t need to consult Le Langage des Fleurs to understand their meanings.

Patience. Loyalty. Tenacity. Commitment. Comfort. Fallibility.

Love. Love. Love.