Prunus serrulata - Ornamental Cherry 'Fudan zakura'
In 2016 I got lucky in a city of over 600,000 - only a very limited quantity of the trees were made available to city residents (and only Vancouver residents as proof of residency had to be produced to make a purchase).
This news article is dated April 27, 2016
BCIT cherry tree sale is an effort to revive rare varieties
The seedlings are the result of a 6-year UBC/BCIT program to save varieties at risk of disappearing. It's a plant sale that has been in the works for six years.
A program to save a few rare varieties of cherry trees — put on by the University of British Columbia and the British Columbia Institute of Technology— is culminating on Friday, as more than 300 seedlings are made available to the public.
Vancouver is known for its beautiful cherry blossoms which explode into bloom each spring, and many of those trees originally came as a gift from Japan after the First World War. Dozens of different varieties were included in the donation, which was meant as a memorial for Japanese soldiers who fought in the war. Some have flourished over the years, but other varieties have begun to disappear.
"If we lost them, they would definitely be gone forever, because we can't import any more cherry trees from Japan, because of virus quarantine issues," said BCIT instructor Keith Turner. Turner and his students in a biotechnology honours program at both UBC and BCIT have been working to collect some of the rarest varieties and reproduce them in test tubes in a process that takes two years before the little clones can be planted.
The hundreds of 12" - 20" seedlings look young, but since they're clones, they're actually about 100 years old. Some of the clones can be traced back to trees in Japan that are now more than 400 years old, according to Turner.
This tree was only about 2ft tall when I got it and now its over 6ft and flowered for the first time this spring!
http://www.bananas.org/gallery/water...e=63028&size=1