The Japanese associate an odd melancholia with the experience of viewing cherry blossoms. To the Japanese, the pleasure of viewing the blossoms is undercut by the brevity of the blooming season, which lasts for only a week or less. The Japanese find a sadness in this and a metaphor for the impermanence of life itself. The haiku poet Basho expressed the feeling this way:

A lovely spring night
suddenly vanished while we
viewed cherry blossoms

Here in Northern Colorado it's the middle of May, and we thought we'd finished with winter. But winter returned to us on Wednesday with one last snowfall. The snow accumulated several inches deep and covered the crabapple trees, which had been at their height of blooming. All across town, crabapples lost their limbs to the snow.

The weather struck hard at crabapple health. And that reminded me of Northern Colorado's former prominence in cherry production and how the industry went under because of severe weather in the 1950s. (Other factors also contributed to the demise of the cherry industry here, but bad weather played its part.)

Loveland, Colorado (the town south of Fort Collins in Larimer County) had been the center of Northern Colorado's cherry industry since the late nineteenth century. In fact, cherry production in Loveland extends back as far as the first permanent settler, Mariano Medina, who was the Hispanic Mountain Man born in Taos, New Mexico who operated a ferry and then a toll bridge at Namaqua, for crossing the Big Thompson River. (At least, I think in researching this article I read about Mariano Medina growing a cherry orchard, but now I can't find the reference – Do you know it?)

By the 1920s, the Spring Glade orchard in Loveland was the largest cherry orchard west of the Mississippi River. Cherry production continued to expand in Northern Colorado throughout the 1930s and 1940s and reached its peak in the 1950s, when three processing plants were located in Loveland, and cherry orchards surrounded the city.

Then the industry declined, although as late as the 1970s commercial cherry orchards still operated in Northern Colorado and included one located on west Prospect Road in Fort Collins.

We've lost something – as the agricultural landscape in Northern Colorado has evolved away from cherry orchards. The loss is hard to explain, but we see it reflected in Loveland's annual Cherry Pie Festival. Cherry orchards are gone from Loveland, but the city's cultural attachment to cherries remains. It's an attachment that persists for no good reason, other than history and sentiment. This year's 24th annual Loveland Cherry Pie Festival will be held on Saturday, July 24th from 5-8 pm at Peters Park next to the Loveland Museum and Gallery.

But, are cherry orchards completely gone from Loveland and Northern Colorado? As Wednesday's snow stressed the limbs of the crabapple trees in Fort Collins, I called up the Larimer County Extension Service, Loveland Museum, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Sunrise Ranch, and Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch. I asked, "Are there any commercial cherry orchards left in Northern Colorado?"

Eventually someone suggested there might be a pick-your-own cherry orchard located on Highway 27, south of Masonville and south of Eden Valley (where Sunrise Ranch is located) but north of the intersection with Highway 34 (and thus not far from Sylvan Dale).

On Wednesday afternoon after school, my daughter and I set off with our camera, in search of the last cherry orchard in Larimer County and Northern Colorado.

We found it. The photo above shows one of the healthier trees. Most of the trees have suckers growing up from their rootstock and cankers practically girdling the trunk. But an irrigation pipe lies between each row of trees, which suggests someone wants to extend – for a bit longer – the life of the last cherry orchard in Larimer County.

I think the Japanese would understand my ambivalence about the 24th annual Loveland Cherry Pie Festival and about finding the last (sickly) cherry orchard in Larimer County. The Festival and orchard defy, yet commemorate, the transience of this region's agricultural landscape.

The trees in the Loveland orchard are either sweet or sour cherries (probably cultivars of Prunus avium or P. cerasus, although the botanic taxonomy of cherries, like that of most commercial fruits, is anything but straightforward). Still, whatever the taxonomic identity might be for the cherries growing in the last cherry orchard in Larimer County, that identity differs from that of the ornamental flowering cherry of Japan, which is known as sakura cherry.

Shown below are five examples of the sakura cherry blossom pattern (and a sixth example is shown above). Graphically, each example minimizes the predictability of a repeating motif, as compared with the graphic effect of a diaper pattern. The sakura patterns thereby convey a sense of spontaneity and movement. The examples shown here – some of them more successfully than others – suggest the image of cherry blossoms falling in the breeze, which serves to underscore the transience of sakura flowering.

A sakura pattern can be distinguished from the similar ume plum blossom pattern by the depiction of five sakura flower petals, where the individual petals are often notched and sometimes include a depiction of stamens. An ume pattern also depicts five flower petals, but the ume petals are usually rounder than those in a sakura pattern, or the ume petals might be represented abstractly as circles. Also, an ume pattern often depicts the ume flower's central carpel as a central circle.