The census was released Thursday, but the numbers were incomplete.

We still don’t know how many Yoshino cherry trees live in Macon.

Cherry Blossom Festival officials place the number at more than 300,000. This translates into three trees for every man, woman and child in the city. And maybe half the dogs and dogwoods, too.

In the archives of the Congressional Record in Washington, D.C. -- a city also known for its rich Yoshino hue -- Macon is cited as the “Cherry Blossom Capital of the World.”

Just for fun, I began issuing my own unofficial head count a few years ago. In 2007, I used the figure 299,638. For the next two years, I rattled off 301,252 whenever someone asked. Last year, I bumped it up to 302,127.

Did I count them all? Don’t be silly. (Of course I did.) Besides, who was going to dispute my mathematically challenged calculations?

The numbers have increased every year on the growth chart. It is human nature -- coupled with Mother Nature -- to have the prevailing optimism of returning bigger and better than before.

This year, I am scaling back my estimate to 300,056 with hopes of making a statement. Several trees planted in the early years of the festival have gone on to that great fireplace in the sky.

Others are reaching the end of their life cycle. They are showing their age spots and visible signs of distress.

This has been a disturbing trend for several years now, so I’m not exactly firing the first warning shot from the bow of the USS Cherry Blossom. If you look around, many of the redwoods of our Yoshino family are having to be replaced.

The life span of these trees usually doesn’t stretch much beyond 30 or 35 years. We never get to place permanent plaques in front of them like we did for the live oak trees at the corner of Vineville Avenue and Calloway Drive. (The oldest trees in the city, planted in 1836 by Bishop George Pierce, the first president of Wesleyan College.)

There have been ongoing efforts to restock our shelves. There is no Yoshino quota for our city. The more, the cherrier.

The 35-woman Wesleyan Woods Garden Club certainly deserve an “attagirl” for their tireless work in one of the festival’s marquee tree-viewing neighborhoods.

Five years ago, they recognized time was running out on some of the trees that line the roads and form the gorgeous canopy along Guerry Drive, Oxford Circle and Oxford Road.

But club members simply didn’t sound the alarm. They were proactive. Since 2007, they have replaced more than 100 of those trees.

I met last week with five club members -- Carole Grant, Emily Cook, Betty Ragland, Elizabeth Dunn and Gail Moulton. Although the garden club was formed in 1975, its roots reach back to the fall of 1973, when residents turned out for a work day to plant 500 cherry trees in the subdivision.

The trees were donated by the late William Fickling Sr., a real estate developer often known as the “Johnny Cherryseed” of Macon. Fickling gave away more than 120,000 of the trees during his lifetime.

Carolyn Crayton, who would found the festival a decade later, lives on Guerry Drive and helped convince her neighbors to plant the trees every 50 feet along Guerry, Oxford and Wesleyan Woods Drive.

At the time, Crayton was director of the Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful Commission. Her vision transformed the neighborhood into a showplace for the trees every spring. When these blooms are at their peak, the beauty is unmatched anywhere on the designated Cherry Blossom Trail.

The garden club enlisted the services of local arborist Matt Peed to help identify the struggling trees. Letters were sent to about 96 residents. The club then contracted with David Hunnicutt of Mid-Georgia Tractor Service to replace them.

Hunnicutt offered larger (2-inch diameter) and taller (about 7 feet) trees at a cost of about $250 each. Crayton was able to obtain a series of $5,000 grants from the National Arbor Day Foundation, and the garden club contributed another $1,500 the first year. That brought the cost down to about $50 per tree for the residents, and 47 new trees were put in the ground in January 2008. Another 45 were planted a year later, and about 20 more have been added this year.

In the near future, it will be important for other individuals and groups to take a lead role the same way this garden club has in its neck of the Wesleyan Woods.

Do the math and keep those trees coming, folks.

Plan. Plant. Replenish the pink.

It will be difficult to host a Cherry Blossom Festival if we wake up one day and have no cherry blossoms.

Reach Gris at 744-4275 or gris@macon.com.