A blizzard of blossoms, one very chatty otter

This past March, our family flew to Ohio for one reason: to swim with otters.

Not just any otters — Asian small-clawed otters, the smallest otter species on earth. For ninety minutes, we sat under a waterfall in an indoor pool — an hour outside of Columbus — while three of these impossibly small, impossibly curious creatures swam in circles, playing with us, chirping in voices so sweet we wished we could bottle them.

Swimming with otters

With our mission accomplished, we had several days left to fill in our Ohio itinerary.

So we went looking for things we didn’t know we wanted to do — and we found them: tic-tac-toe archery, sauna-pods overlooking the foothills, and blend-your-scent candle-making. But the most unexpected find was Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus — over a hundred cherry trees in full bloom lining an undulating walkway, and a story I had no idea existed.

Sauna pod in nature

It turns out those cheery blossom trees weren’t just planted. They were gifted. In 2012, as part of a nationwide initiative marking the centennial of Japan’s original 1912 gift of cherry trees to Washington, D.C., twenty cherry trees arrived in Columbus. Forty more followed in 2018, forty-two more in 2020 — today the conservatory holds over a hundred.

But that 1912 gift has its own backstory. In the 1880s, Eliza Scidmore fell for Japan’s cherry trees and spent the next 24 years urging Washington to plant its own. By 1909 — then an associate editor at National Geographic — she finally wrote to First Lady Helen Taft, who said yes in just two days.

In Washington by chance that spring, Japanese chemist Dr. Jokichi Takamine — the man who’d isolated adrenaline — heard a modest planting was already underway and proposed something bigger: a formal gift of 2,000 trees. Tokyo’s mayor, Yukio Ozaki, agreed. But their first shipment arrived in January 1910 infested with insects and disease — President Taft ordered them all burned. So Japan tried again. On March 26, 1912, the second shipment of 3,020 trees arrived in good health. The next day, Mrs. Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first two Yoshino cherry trees at the Tidal Basin — a gesture Columbus would echo a century later.

But why cherry blossoms, specifically? The Japanese have amassed under these trees for over a thousand years — a tradition called hanami, literally “flower viewing,” where friends and family gather beneath the blossoms, food and drink in hand. A week or so after peak bloom, wind strips the blossoms loose all at once, in what’s called sakura-fubuki — “cherry blossom blizzard,” the same word used for an actual snowstorm. In Japanese aesthetics, that falling isn’t treated as an ending. The scattering matters as much as the blooming — the petals let go while they’re still vivid and whole, not once they’ve faded. It’s a different expression of the same beauty, not the loss of it.

That idea — a fleeting moment of beauty, scattered, transforming into another — is akin to how I perceive the gift of an opal stone. So when I walked the path at Franklin Park Conservatory, gazing at the cherry trees lining it, I watched, breath held, as the wind rose and the petals came down en masse — pink, purple, and white snow. In that moment, I knew exactly what I would create from a blushing opal I’d sourced and re-cut months before: a moment of beauty captured under the blossoms, blended with the transformation of a stone. My own brand of hanami.

Our Hanami Australian Opal Necklace is our own private sakura-fubuki. At its center, a pink crystal boulder opal flickers with pastel blue-green fire, like hazakura — the tender green the Japanese say arrives just as the last blossoms let go. Around it, a graduated halo of pink, lavender, and purple sapphires drifts outward in a soft, scalloped flow. It’s not a flower — more the memory of one, the moment right before the wind takes it.