The America's National Parks Podcast is sponsored by L.L. Bean.

This year, L.Bine is joining up with the National Park Foundation,

the official non-profit partner of the National Park Service to help you find your happy place in an amazing system of more than 400 national parks

including historic and cultural sites, monuments, preserves, lakeshores, and seashores

that dot the American landscape,

many of which you'll find just a short trip from home.

L.L. Bean is proud to be an official partner of the National Park Foundation.

Discover your perfect day in a park at find your park.com.

Each spring an abundance of winter weary locals and tourists flock to our nation's

capital hoping to see the blossoming beauty of the famed Japanese Cherry trees.

You may know that the original trees were a gift from Japan in 1912, symbolizing international

friendship, but you may not know that they're also a testament to one woman's persistence and the value of

never giving up on a dream. On this episode of America's National Parks, the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C.

Here's Abigail Treview. And the In 1885, 29-year-old Eliza Ru Hamas-Gidmore returned to the United States following her first visit to Japan,

where her brother George worked for the U.S. Consular Service.

While there she developed a great appreciation for the Japanese culture, people, and the beauty of the Japanese flowering cherry trees.

She brought back with her a desire to introduce the beauty of the Japanese Cherry Blossoms to the American people.

Upon returning to Washington, D.C. and resuming her life as an author, travel writer, newspaper correspondent, and photographer,

Skidmore began promoting her idea of planting flower trees in Potomac Park on land recently reclaimed from the Potomac River.

As she explained in a 1928 newspaper article in the Washington Sunday Star, since they had to plant something in that

great stretch of raw reclaimed ground by the riverbank, since they had to hide those old

dump heaps with something. Since they might as well plant the most beautiful thing in the world, the Japanese Cherry Tree.

...