The sun is setting on Stumpy, the gnarled old cherry tree that has become a social media phenom. This year's cherry blossom festivities in Washington will be the last for Stumpy and more than 100 other cherry trees that will be cut down as part of a multiyear restoration of their Tidal Basin home, per the AP. Starting in early summer, crews will begin working to replace the crumbling seawall around the Tidal Basin, the area around the Jefferson Memorial with the highest concentration of cherry trees. The work has been long overdue, as the deterioration, combined with rising sea levels, has resulted in Potomac waters regularly surging over the barriers.
Plans call for 140 cherry trees—and 300 trees total—to be removed and turned into mulch. When the project is concluded, 277 cherry trees will be planted as replacements. Stumpy will not be among the survivors. The tree became a social media star during the pandemic fever dream of 2020. Its legacy has spawned T-shirts, a calendar, and a devoted fanbase. News of Stumpy's final spring has prompted people to leave flowers and bourbon and had one Reddit user threatening to chain themselves to the trunk to save the tree.
The $133 million project to rebuild and reinforce the sea wall will take about three years, said Mike Litterst of the National Park Service. "It's certainly going to benefit the visitor experience, and that's very important to us," Litterst said. "But most of all, it's going to benefit the cherry trees, who right now are every day, twice a day, seeing their roots inundated with the brackish water of the Tidal Basin." Litterst said entire stretches of trees to the water, as wide as 100 yards, have been lost and can't be replaced "until we fix the underlying cause of what killed them in the first place."
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