New York Today: City in Bloom

The National Cherry Blossom Festival is again making our country’s capital blush.

Which got us wondering — is there an official flower for New York City?

The state flower has long been the rose. A decade ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg named the city flower the daffodil, widely used to commemorate the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. Before that, there were official borough flowers — the tulip and rose for Queens, the pinkster azalea for Staten Island, the yellow forsythia for Brooklyn and the day lily for the Bronx. Manhattan did not have one.

But with spring flora beginning to blossom, we thought it was a perfect time to nominate a new city bloom. We asked some local flower experts to weigh in.

Native witch hazel, said Scot Medbury, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

The city flower would have to be resilient enough to handle the roller coaster that is winter in New York, Mr. Medbury told us.