This winter we had our first in-person gathering with the charity trustees since the March 2020 lockdown.
Unfortunately and quite inevitably some members couldn’t make it due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, or because they lived on the other side of the world in Japan.
For those who could come together during this festive season, we befittingly met at Kew Gardens where there is a memorial tree for Akemi Tanaka Solloway Pennington, the late founder of this charity.
The tree is a sakura (cherry blossom) species known as Prunus ‘matsumae usugasane somei’. Akemi’s tree stands to the West of the Temperate House and there is a small plaque on the trunk with her name on it.
Kew Gardens had been decorated for the Christmas Lights spectacle, and so Akemi’s tree had colourful electric lights all over it (as you can see from the pictures). The branches were bare, but the tree still looked beautiful with all its dormant buds awaiting the Spring. We look forward to visiting Akemi’s tree many times over in years to come.
If you would like to visit Akemi’s tree and want to know the precise location of it, then feel free to email us and we can send you a map of where it is. Please note the opening hours and entry prices for Kew Gardens, which you can find on their website here.
