Bloom’s Off Cherry Blossom Festival

WASHINGTON —  For organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival, which begins Sunday, the most frustrating part of the job may be in dealing with the vagaries of Mother Nature.

Since it began 66 years ago, the festival has coincided with the peak bloom of the capital’s famed cherry trees slightly more than one-third of the time, according to the National Park Service. Peak bloom has evaded the festival four of the last five years--last year was the exception.

And this year’s blossom bash won’t be much different. The late winter snowstorm that roared through Washington in mid-March is expected to delay the peak bloom of most of Washington’s 3,376 cherry trees until about April 8, five days after the festival ends.

“Each year we go through crossing our fingers that they will bloom and that Mother Nature will cooperate,” said Jackie Wolfe, president of the National Cherry Blossom Festival Committee Inc. “It can be frustrating.”

Since the first festival in 1927, the peak bloom has graced the event 19 times, but evaded it 36 times, Park Service records show. No festival was held from 1928 through 1933, during World War II and in 1946.

The trees were given to the United States in 1912 by the mayor of Tokyo, Yokio Ozaki, to be “a memorial of national friendship between the U.S. and Japan.”