Prunus × yedoensis

 ( Yedoensis ) 

From the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period, gardeners and craftsman who made the village at Somei in Edo (now Komagome, Toshima ward, Tokyo) grew someiyoshino. They first offered them as Yoshinozakura, but in 1900, they were renamed someiyoshino by Dr. Fujino. This is sometimes rendered as 'Somei-Yoshino'.

The Yoshino cherry was introduced to Europe and North America in 1902.Mitchell, A. F. (1974). A Field Guide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe. Collins The National Cherry Blossom Festival is a spring celebration in Washington, D.C., commemorating the 1912 gift of Japanese cherry trees from Tokyo to the city of Washington. They are planted in the Tidal Basin park. Several of 2,000 Japanese cherry trees given to the citizens of Toronto by the citizens of Tokyo in 1959 were planted in High Park. Pilgrim Hill in New York City's Central Park is popular for its groves of pale flowering Yoshino cherry trees as they burst into bloom in the spring.

• In 1916, Ernest Henry Wilson concluded that Yoshino cherry strongly suggests a hybrid between Prunus itosakura and Prunus speciosa (Oshima cherry). It has many characters of the latter and in its venation, pubescence and shape of the cupula resembles the former
• In 1963, Takenaka assumed that Yoshino cherry is a hybrid between Prunus speciosa (Oshima cherry) and Prunus itosakura.
• In 1986, Takafumi Kaneko et al. carried out restriction endonuclease analysis on chloroplast ctDNA. Yoshino cherry showed no interplant variation of ctDNA and had the same ctDNA as P. pendula (Edo higan), differing from P. lannesiana (Oshima cherry) by a single HindIII restriction site. This findings suggests that P. pendula is female parent of P. yedoensis.
• In 1995, Hideki Innan et al. conducted DNA fingerprinting study using different kinds of probes, M13 repeat sequence and (GACA)₄ synthetic oligonucleotide and concluded that Yoshino cherry was produced only once through hybridization between Prunus speciosa (Oshima cherry) and Prunus itosakura and that this particular hybrid plant has been spread vegetatively all over Japan,
• In 2014, Shuri Kato et al. conducted molecular analysis using nuclear simple sequence repeat (SSR) polymorphisms to trace cultivar origins and Bayesian clustering based on the STRUCTURE analysis using SSR genotypes revealed that Yoshino cherry is a hybrid between Prunus itosakura and Prunus speciosa (Oshima cherry) although there was also a small and nonsignificant association with Prunus jamasakura. The proportion of each species is Edo higan 47%, Oshima cherry 37%, and jamasakura 11%. Online Resource 5 [2]
• In 2015, Ikuo Nakamura et al. analyzed sequences of intron 19 and exon 20 of PolA1. One of two exon 20 sequences found in Yoshino cherry was the same as that of P. pendula (Edo higan), whereas the other sequence was shared with several taxa in seven wild species, including P. jamasakura (Yamazakura) and P. lannesiana (Oshima cherry). Yoshino cherry contained two different haplotypes of the intron 19 sequences; one was the same as that of Oshima cherry. While another haplotype of Yoshino cherry was different from that of Edo higan by two SNPs but identical to one of two haplotypes of P. pendula ‘Komatsuotome,’ which is a cultivar of Edo higan. These results indicated that Yoshino cherry probably originated by the hybridization of cultivars derived from Edo higan and Oshima cherry.

• In 1908, a French missionary Taquet discovered a native cherry in Jeju islands, Korea and in 1912 a German botanist Koehne gave it a scientific name Prunus yedoensis var. nudiflora. Although this species called Eishu zakura is a variation of Yoshino cherry ('Somei-yoshino'), from then it was misrepresented that Yoshino cherry was growing naturally in Jeju Island.
• In 1933, the Japanese botanist Gen'ichi Koizumi reported that Yoshino cherry originated on Jeju Province, South Korea. Koreans claimed that the Japanese stole Yoshino cherry from South Korea at the time of Japanese annexation of Korea.
• In 1962, Yo Takenaka ruled out the possibility of Korean origin by the morphological study.
• In 1995 DNA fingerprinting technology was used to conclude that Yoshino cherry grown in many parts of Japan under the name Prunus ×  yedoensis is indeed clonally propagated from the same hybrid offspring of Prunus lannesiana ( Oshima cherry) and Prunus pendula ( Edo higan), which confirms the 1991 conclusion given by Iwasaki Fumio that Prunus ×  yedoensis originated around 1720–1735 by artificial crossing of these species in Tokyo.(1991), 3:95−110 Oshima cherry is an endemic species found only around Izu Islands, Izu Peninsula and Bōsō Peninsulas not around Korean Peninsula.
• In 2007, a study conducted on the comparison of Japanese Yoshino cherry and Korean King cherry concluded that the trees native to these two places can be categorized as distinct species. It was confirmed that South Korea's claim was false.
• In 2016, the phylogenetic analysis of nrDNA ITS data and the cpDNA haplotype network analysis suggested that independent origin between King cherry and yoshino cherry, respectively.
• In 2016, a new scientific name Cerasus ×  nudiflora was given to King cherry to distinguish it from Yoshino cherry ( Prunus ×  yedoensis).

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