Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod. A show about the past, rediscovered.

Oh, they're absolutely spectacular. It's like walking through a little nirvana in Washington, D.C.

Oh, they make me feel like springtime. Spring has finally arrived.

I love flowers, so I just, I love Mother Nature.

It's relaxing, rejuvenating.

Amazing.

It's very nice.

We haven't anything like this in Norway.

Every spring, Washington, D.C. changes its hue.

Cherry blossom trees flower with light pink blooms,

lining the banks of the tidal basin and dotting the capital streets. These trees are the

city's botanical mascot. More than one million people attend the National Cherry Blossom Festival each year.

There's a big parade and even pink fireworks.

The festival ends with Sakura Matsuri, the biggest celebration of Japanese culture in the United States.

That's because the trees, in addition to being just plain beautiful, have been a standing

symbol of Japanese-American friendship for more than a century. But the trees, well, they haven't

always been embraced with such kindness. The story of the trees begins on February 14th, 1912,

when 3,000 cherry blossom trees were shipped from Japan to the United States.

The saplings were sent as a gift, according to the National Park Service,

by the city of Tokyo, to then First Lady Helen Taft.

When the trees arrived in Seattle a month later, they were loaded onto insulated freight train cars

and sent to Washington, D.C., First Lady Taft and Vicontas Chinda, wife of the Japanese

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