Cherry Blossoms, War, and Shalom: The Hidden History of Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The cherry blossom trees at Brooklyn Botanic Garden are a popular instagram spot. But did you know they’re nearly a hundred years old! In fact, the story of this garden is tangled up with world history—especially both World Wars.

Take the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, one of the first completed portions of BBG. It was one of the first public Japanese-style gardens in the U.S., designed by Japanese American landscape architect Takeo Shiota. It opened in 1915, the same year Japan issued its “Twenty-One Demands,” laying out aggressive expansionist plans in Asia. Tensions were rising between Japan and the Western Allies, who rejected Japan’s Demands. And right in the middle of all that, Brooklyn chose to open a peaceful Japanese garden.

That wasn’t just landscaping. That was a statement. And for Shiota, it came from a deeply personal place of his own identity—but you can tell it was a powerful statement to many others, too, because after World War I ended, the Japanese government donated the very first cherry blossom trees in 1921.

And the cherry tree esplanade? Planted in 1941. Yes—that 1941. The year of Pearl Harbor. The year the U.S. entered World War II, and anti-Japanese sentiment erupted nationwide. Within months, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were forcibly detained—stripped of homes, businesses, and basic rights… including, unfortunately, Shiota himself. The Auxiliary, some of whom may have known Shiota, chose that year to plant these Japanese cherry blossoms. 

Both moments—two different wars, decades apart—gave us what are now two of the most iconic, beloved spots in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Both moments chose beauty over fear. Connection over division. Cultivation over destruction.

That’s shalom.

Now, let’s talk about that Hebrew word for a second. Shalom is often translated as “peace,” but that doesn’t really do it justice. If peace just means the absence of conflict, then planting gardens during wartime seems like a sweet, but empty gesture at best, or a mockery at worst.

But shalom is deeper than that. It’s about wholeness. Harmony. It’s a rich concept perhaps best defined as mutual flourishing between all parts of creation.

It’s not just about humans getting along. It’s about humans and the earth in relationship. Take a deep breath. You breathe out CO2 unto the trees, and breathe in oxygen that they exhale back to you. That’s a small picture of the shalom we were created for.

Now, shalom, in a broken world, takes effort. It takes—you guessed it—cultivation.

Which brings us back to these cherry blossoms. They aren’t just shalom because of their origin, their very existence is a kind of shalom.

You see, cherry blossoms are a kind of plant called a cultivar. 

Most people don’t know that wild cherry blossoms are usually white. They only appear pink rarely, due to a genetic mutation. But people delighted in these odd pink blossoms so much that they worked to preserve and encourage them. They saw beauty, and they decided it was worth tending, and now, they’re so ubiquitous that people think the pink color is the norm!

That’s shalom. The trees offered us beauty; we delighted in them and cared for them, allowing them to grow differently. Mutual flourishing.

And there’s more. Have you noticed how stuffed these blossoms are? They seem impossibly full of petals… Because they are! These are double blossoms—they’ve grown twice the number of petals a flower is naturally able to. How? By giving up their reproductive organs, developing them as petals instead. 

That’s right: they’re sterile. They can’t reproduce on their own.

So how are they still here?

Every one of these trees had to be propagated by hand. Someone had to take a cutting from an older tree, root it, plant it, and care for it until it grew strong. Over and over, through generations.

That’s a lot of time. A lot of effort. A lot of quiet faith that beauty is worth the work.

And maybe you’re thinking: in the face of global war, is it really worth it? Why bother planting pink trees that can’t even make more trees? Why tend to fragile blooms that will flash and fade every spring with remarkable quickness? Is that kind of Shalom worthwhile?

But this—this—is the work artists are called to. To cultivate. To appreciate. To tend and to create, even when the world feels like it’s falling apart. Especially when it feels that way.

Christian artists especially, who have this idea of shalom, this call to tend to creation and appreciate how it nurtures us, should look at these trees as a vivid example of what it means to create work with purpose.

Nearly a hundred years later, these trees are still here. Still impossible. Still blooming. Still offering us shalom in the face of a fractured world.

Can you smell them? Feel the sweet air filling our lungs, breathe it back out to the trees. Consider the cut and planted trunks, the double spiral of petals, the vibrant pink color. Consider the care it took to bring fragile trees here from Japan… in the face of enormous global conflict. Consider what memories these trees hold, what a tradition they’ve become for countless people, who journey to see them year after year.

Shalom, friends.