March for Our Lives protest delays National Cherry Blossom Festival opening ceremony

Organizers of the National Cherry Blossom Festival have delayed the opening ceremony one day to avoid crowds attending the March for Our Lives on Saturday.

The opening ceremony will be held from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Sunday at the Warner Theatre with performances celebrating Japanese culture. The delay actually brings the ceremony one day closer to the cherry blossoms’ peak bloom — March 31, according to the National Park Service.

Festival organizers said they expect about 1.5 million people to flock to the National Mall to view the area’s 3,700 cherry blossom trees over the next two weeks.

“The festival has been around for more than 90 years celebrating the gift of trees,” one organizer said. “We have more than 50 events as part of our calendar this year, and it’s become something people really look forward to this year.”

It’s also a significant tourism opportunity for the District, which attracted 22 million tourists who spent $7.3 billion around the region in 2016, according to Destination DC. The tourism marketing group said that bookings at local hotels have risen sharply in March for the last seven years in connection with the cherry blossom festival.

“I’ve always wanted to go to the blossom festival,” Autumn Matta of Pittsburgh said as she shopped and did some sightseeing Sunday in the District.

“And I’m here for the food,” said her partner, Anthony Lalama.

Amid reports that the numbers of international visitors have declined since President Trump’s inauguration, Destination DC President Elliott L. Ferguson said his group won’t know how attendance at the festival may be affected until data from 2017 are collated.

“There’s at least one international meeting that did not select Washington, D.C., because of the sentiment, but there’s also a lot of positive momentum with D.C.’s top overseas market, China, and new nonstop international flights launching soon,” Mr. Ferguson said in a statement.

Unfortunately, large crowds of visitors also incur thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the trees — sometimes just by walking.

“When people walk all around the trees, it compacts the soil, which restricts the oxygen to the tree,” said Kate Greenberg, marketing director with the Trust for the National Mall. “The roots have nowhere to go.”

National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst said the agency tries to lessen the effect by blasting compacted soil with air.

“The National Park Service aerates the soil using a highly focused supersonic air stream (approximately 1,300 mph) to penetrate soil and fracture soil away from tree roots, creating trenches that resemble the spokes on a bicycle wheel,” Mr. Litterst said in an email.

After breaking up the soil with blasts of air, park service workers fill it in with a lightweight mixture of sandy loam topsoil, shale and composted leaves. However, the cherry blossoms’ millions of visitors do worse damage than packing down the soil.

“Another problem created by the crowds is physical damage to the trees, in the form of broken branches, damaged bark and open wounds to the trunks of the trees, generally caused by people trying to climb the trees or break off branches of blossoms,” Mr. Litterst said.

The work is so extensive that the park service employs a year-round crew of professional arborists to provide “wound care” for the trees, he said.

Still, each year about 90 trees that are too damaged to repair are mulched and returned to the soil on the Mall before being replaced by new trees. The Trust says this costs the park service $54,000 a year.

The Trust raises private donations to help defray the maintenance costs on the Mall, and this year will be selling lapel pins during the festival to raise money.

“To date, nearly $300,000 has been raised for the endowment,” the Trust’s project manager, Teresa Durkin, said in an email. “In order to produce meaningful annual payments that would support additional maintenance of the trees, an estimated $5 million is needed.”