Brooklyn Botanic Garden at the top of the cherry season: the Cherry Esplanade with its double rows of Kanzan cherries in full pink bloom either side of the long lawn, the Sakura Matsuri crowd picnicking under them, and beside it the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden with its vermilion torii standing in the water, the viewing deck, the shrine on the hill and the koi that come to the rail when you do. The New Yorkers hang on screens inside the Palm House at the head of the lawn, on the back wall of the viewing deck, and on boards between the benches.
The site of Brooklyn Botanic Garden was designated in 1897 and the garden opened in May 1911 at 990 Washington Avenue; it occupies 52 acres and draws over 800,000 visitors a year. The Cherry Esplanade was created in 1941 when the garden's Women's Auxiliary donated four rows of cherry trees; it has two rows of tall cherries and several rows of shorter ones, 76 trees representing 21 varieties, and the garden as a whole has more than 200 cherry trees of 42 Asian species and cultivated varieties across the Cherry Walk and the Esplanade, with 30 trees planted on the Cherry Walk in 1921. The double flowering Kanzan cherries typically bloom at the end of April, and allees of scarlet oak, the Liberty Oaks, planted in remembrance of September 11, 2001, line the Esplanade's eastern and western edges. The garden has held an annual cherry blossom festival since 1982. The Japanese Hill and Pond Garden was created by Takeo Shiota and opened in June 1915, a $13,000 gift of Alfred Tredway White; its three acres hold three man made hills, a waterfall, an island and a curved pond of hundreds of koi, with a torii and a Shinto shrine. The shrine burned in January 1938 and a new one was dedicated in May 1960 after vandals burned its predecessor; the garden was restored in 2000 for about $3 million. McKim, Mead and White's Laboratory Administration Building and Palm House were dedicated in April 1917, and the Steinhardt Conservatory opened on May 19, 1988.
Source · Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Wikipedia, and Cherry Esplanade, bbg.org ↗
Two rows of tall Kanzan cherries each side of the broad lawn with the shorter rows and the scarlet oaks outside them, petals falling and lying pink on the grass, the picnic crowd, the glass and iron Palm House with its barrel roof at the north end, the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden: the pond, the vermilion torii in the water, the wooden viewing deck, the Shinto shrine on its hill, the waterfall, the stone lanterns, the little arched bridge, the koi and the turtles on their rock. Mood: petals on everything. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.