Roland Maurice Jefferson Collection

Roland Maurice Jefferson (b. 1923) was born in Washington, D.C., on September 3, 1923. He earned a bachelor's degree in botany from Howard University in 1950 and started labeling plants at the United States National Arboretum (USNA) in 1956. The next year, Jefferson was promoted to become the first African-American botanist at the USNA. Over the next decade he studied crabapples.

In 1973, Jefferson started compiling historical and scientific data about the Japanese cherry trees planted in Washington, D.C.'s Potomac Park, which included taking cuttings from the surviving trees. In 1977, he published The Japanese flowering cherry trees of Washington, D.C., which was later translated into Japanese. In 1978 and 1979, he was part of a plant expedition in Europe to study cherry and crabapple trees. In 1981, Nancy Reagan presented the President Reagan Cherry Tree to Japan, which Jefferson propagated from the 1912 cherry tree that First Lady Helen Taft planted after receiving it as a gift from Japan to the United States.

From 1981 to 1983, Jefferson lived in Japan to study, lecture, and collect ornamental cherry tree budwood. He operated the dogwood seed exchange program from 1982 to 1983, in which Japanese school children collected cherry seeds to exchange for American dogwood seeds. In 1983, he married Keiko Ishisaki. In 1986, Jefferson led expeditions into Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to study cherry trees. He retired from the USNA in 1987, but continued to lecture on cherry trees in Japan through 1998.