America Letter:You know that spring has come to Washington when the cherry blossoms come out near the Jefferson Memorial as congressmen and senators head home for a two-week recess. The city was enjoying its first extended spell of warm sunshine last weekend when more than 3,000 trees came into bloom right on cue for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, a fortnight of events to celebrate the US capital's very own rite of spring.
There are daily bicycle rides, concerts at Union Station and a Japanese street festival with beer gardens, an arts and crafts fair and an opportunity to play the music video game Dance, Dance Revolution.
The trees themselves were a gift from the mayor of Tokyo in 1912, although most were replaced in 1965 when the Japanese sent over 3,800 more. A few of the originals survive, withered and bent and dubbed "witnesses" by the National Parks Service.
These old trees have survived drought, flood, disease, insects and a rampage by delinquent beavers in 1999, but horticulturalists fear that the growing number of human visitors could prove too much for them. In 1941, a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, vandals cut down four cherry blossom trees in a patriotic gesture unrivalled in its imbecility until the renaming of French fries a few years ago.
These days, tourists snap off branches to take home as souvenirs and suffocate the soil around the roots by trampling on it thousands of times a day.
The cherry blossoms were part of President William Howard Taft's noble effort to beautify Washington, one of the few capital cities in the world to be treated with consistent, studied neglect by the government it houses. A one-term president who came third when he sought re-election, Taft was full of sound ideas and kept a cow called Pauline Wayne grazing on the White House lawn to provide milk for his family.
He was rare among US presidents in seeking to improve a city that has always had a half-hearted air about it, as grandeur and shabbiness live side by side and the National Mall is left to become overgrown and crime-infested. If you take a walk downtown after 7pm, you will often be the only person on the street as the city empties out to the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.
Even many of its permanent residents behave as if Washington is no more than a temporary staging post in their lives and the city is full of New York exiles who can bore for hours about the metropolitan delights they are missing and the inadequacies of the "company town" that has become their adopted home.
The city takes on a different mood when Congress is away and while Mother Nature marked the spring recess this week by sending the cherry blossoms into full bloom, congressional staffers celebrated their bosses' absence by crowding into the city's bars for happy hour. Because most people in Washington are in bed by 11pm, happy hour is the only time that bars attract much business during the week and competition between them is fierce. One place has just instituted a special offer every Thursday, when you can drink as much as you like between 4pm and 8pm for $9, an offer that just might be asking for trouble.
Thousands of visitors descended on the Tidal Basin to view the cherry blossoms at the start of the week but many more decided to wait until Wednesday or Thursday, when the trees were due to reach peak bloom. Meanwhile, in Canada and the north of the US, a snow storm was gathering strength and preparing to move southwards.
It rained heavily in Washington on Wednesday and a strong wind tore through the city on Thursday morning so that, just as they reached the zenith of their beauty, all the pink and white petals of the cherry blossoms were blown away.
