A couple of years ago, to great fanfare, the Mayor of London and the Director General of the National Trust opened the London Blossom Garden in the Olympic Park. The idea was to create a place of reflection for Londoners who'd lost loved ones to coronavirus, the pandemic having first emerged during the blossom season. Unfortunately by the time they got round to opening the garden it was May and all the blossom had fallen, but the Mayor still gave the project a dozen tweetsworth of publicity.
It was an honour to open the London Blossom Garden today with a moving ceremony at @NoOrdinaryPark. I was so proud to be joined by some of our key workers to cut the ribbon. The garden is a living memorial to the Londoners we’ve lost to COVID-19 and a tribute to all key workers. [@MayorofLondon May 24 2021]
Last year the garden was fully open and accessible on the second anniversary of lockdown but the blossoms weren't especially amazing, partly because the trees were still young but also because the species used were deliberately designed to flower at different times. That meant they never looked collectively impressive, nor indeed would any single tree ever have made you go wow. But the garden still merited one Mayoral tweet in 2022 because it was still on the publicity radar.
A year ago today, we officially opened the London Blossom Garden at @NoOrdinaryPark as a living memorial to all those who we lost during the pandemic. As the trees bloom again this spring and in the years to come, I hope all Londoners enjoy it as a peaceful place for reflection. [@MayorofLondon Mar 23 2022]
This year I had hoped that more mature trees would put on a better show but they haven't. Most have merely bloomed rather than dazzled, the unsynchronised nature of the flowering again diminishing any spectacle, and at least one of the trees appears to be dead. The garden's still a perfectly lovely spot but it's not become a draw for remembrance having never caught the public's imagination, and this year the Mayor didn't bother tweeting about it at all.
Perhaps it's a wider cultural thing that the pandemic has become something to try to forget rather than commemorate. Perhaps it's that there's no national attempt to remember lives lost on a particular day so any local projects lack traction. Or perhaps in planning the garden they failed to create a cohesive whole that stirs the soul and everyone's now lost interest.
It is possible to create a simple display of trees whose blossom makes you go wow, as exemplified by these dozen ornamental cherry trees planted along Footscray Road, New Eltham. Their clouds of pink, though temporary, are hugely more impressive than the three rings in the Olympic Park. Hopefully a few more years of growth will improve the E20 display, otherwise this well-meaning reflective project is destined to be forgotten.
