Visitors to the International Cherry Blossom Festival share a common question.
“Where can we see the cherry trees?”
Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful board members hear that asked often while selling trees at Carolyn Crayton Park during the festival.
The answer is complicated, so the board is spearheading an effort to plant trees for a new Cherry Blossom Trail near downtown through the generosity of the Fickling family.
At Thursday’s KMBB meeting, Chair Natasha Christian announced the organization would be spreading the pink around town.
“There will be several varieties of cherry blossom trees because we all know cherry blossom trees bloom on their own time, not necessarily on our time when we want them to bloom, right? So that will help us with hopefully having some pink cherry blossom trees during the festival,” Christian said.
Landscape architect and KMBB board member Laurie Fickling, is the great-granddaughter of the late businessman and festival co-founder, William A. Fickling Sr., who began propagating and sharing the flowering trees about 50 years ago. Fickling designed the proposed new loop of plantings.
She chose other types of flowering trees, such as Sweetbay magnolia, purple leaf plum, and crabapple. Longleaf, slash and Japanese black pines and oaks will support the flowering cherry trees.
“I included just some other trees that weren’t even blooming, flowering trees because the cherry trees do love to be a little bit of an edge-of-the-woods, understory-type trees, with planted oaks and pine trees and stuff in tandem with these so that we’re creating an environment that will hopefully do a little better throughout their lifetime,” Fickling said.
The Fickling-sponsored project of up to $50,000 in grant funds will also remove and replace diseased cherry trees.
“We all know that the cherry trees here have a pretty short life span in general, and especially as it gets warmer in the summers. A lot of those things, the diseases and the bugs that get them have gotten worse,” Fickling said. “So, we’re trying to make sure we kind of stay one step ahead of that, continuing to plant and continuing to diversify.”
The city’s original Cherry Blossom Trail stretches from near Carolyn Crayton Park all the way to the Fickling Farm at Rivoli and Northside drives.
While dozens of trees lining the streets of Wesleyan Woods have been compared to the flowering canopy along Washington D.C.’s Tidal Basin loop trail, the north Macon neighborhood is tucked away about nine miles from the main festival venues.
Although the Cherry Blossom Festival documented more than 350,000 trees distributed in recent decades, many of them have fallen to disease or old age with a lifespan of only about 30 years.
KMBB board member Janice Habersham serves as a tour guide during the festival, but no longer feels comfortable boasting about hundreds of thousands of flowering cherry trees.
“I don’t know where they are,” said Habersham, who thinks the new project is a great mission for the beautification board.
KMBB Executive Director Asha Ellen has teamed up with the county’s Parks & Beautification director Michael Glisson on a number of tree-planting grants totalling nearly a half-million dollars, Glisson estimated.
Beginning this fall and over the next few years, county workers will plant and maintain the new trees along this in-town trail that was forged with guidance from Visit Macon.
Plans call for more than 100 trees going in at Carolyn Crayton Park, along Mulberry Street, Coleman Hill, Washington Park, Rose Hill Park near Mount de Sales, Tattnall Square Park and along Oglethorpe Street.
“We chose these routes because these are all county-owned properties. I don’t have to go to Miss Sally who lives in Wesleyan Woods and say, “Hey, can we plant some trees?” Glisson explained to the board.
It will also provide public spaces for tourists to take photographs instead of them traipsing onto private property.
KMBB board member Kaye Hlavaty told the board that the Wesleyan Woods Garden Club helps its neighborhood residents replace aging or diseased trees to help preserve the historic northern trail.
“The Wesleyan Woods Garden Club sends out a letter every year for people. We do a grant where if it would cost $150 to replace your tree, you can do it for $75. So, we are addressing that,” Hlavaty said.
Fickling noted that a number of hybrid trees, such as the flowering Helen Taft with a deeper pink blossom, are more resistant to heat and disease than the original yoshinos.
In recent years, former KMBB board member Wayne Woodworth introduced the other varieties at the board’s annual tree sale during the festival, but Fickling pointed out that many of those trees left with the tourists.
“We had people from Florida and all over coming to buy the trees, which is great. We’re glad that people are spreading that, but it wasn’t keeping the trees here and enhancing what we have to show during the festival,” Fickling said.
As a result, Christian informed the board that going forward they would focus on the trail and stop selling trees during the festival.
“They’re not being planted here, just quite frankly, and it’s not profitable for us. So, we’re going to focus our efforts on this Cherry Blossom Tree Trail that we’re moving to downtown,” Christian said. “Our focus is planting the town pink. That’s kind of our mission.”
— Civic Journalism Senior Fellow Liz Fabian covers Macon-Bibb County government entities for The Macon Newsroom and can be reached at [email protected].
