Cherry blossom bloom time across the US
Interactive map
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City by city
Typical window, earliest first. Cultivars of the same flower can open days or weeks apart.
What a cherry blossom is, and how it differs from a fruiting cherry
A cherry blossom is the flower of an ornamental cherry, a tree in the genus Prunus grown for its spring display. The genus holds about 200 species of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs, and the same genus supplies cherry, plum, apricot, nectarine and peach. Ornamental flowering fruit trees are closely related to the orchard trees and many of them do bear edible fruit, but they are grown mainly for the spring flowers and the shape of the tree. That is the difference people ask about: an orchard cherry is selected for what you eat in July, an ornamental cherry for what opens in April. The trees planted for blossom in the United States were bred for blooms, and most cultivars of the Japanese flowering cherry bear no fruit at all. A few do set small cherries in summer, too sour for people but eaten by birds.
More than one East Asian tree stands behind the name. Prunus serrulata, the Japanese flowering cherry, is native to East and South China, Japan and Korea, and the cherry blossom is the national flower of Japan. The Yoshino, the tree most Americans picture, is a hybrid first noticed in Tokyo about 1872 and known there as Somei-yoshino. Its parentage and origin are unknown, and every Yoshino is a grafted plant, which is part of why a whole avenue of them opens on the same morning. Higan cherry is a naturally occurring Japanese hybrid, and the true hybrid is rarely sold in commerce. Sargent cherry, also called North Japanese hill cherry, carries shiny reddish-brown bark and pink flowers in two to four flowered clusters that open before the leaves. Not every famous cultivar came out of Asia: 'Okame' was bred in England by Captain Collingwood Ingram, who crossed Prunus incisa with Prunus campanulata to get the hot pink flowers of one parent without the cold sensitivity that came with them.
The American story starts in 1912, when planting cherry trees in Washington began as a gift of friendship from the people of Japan to the people of the United States, and 3,020 trees of twelve varieties arrived on March 26 of that year, 1,800 of them Somei-Yoshino. The scions had been cut in December 1910 from the collection along the Arakawa River in Adachi Ward near Tokyo and grafted onto understock grown in Itami City in Hyogo Prefecture, so the Tidal Basin trees trace back to a single Japanese collection. Japan sent a second gift of 3,800 Yoshinos in 1965, many of them planted on the Washington Monument grounds, and between 2002 and 2006 four hundred trees propagated from the surviving 1912 trees were planted so the original genetic line continues. About 3,800 cherry trees grow in the park today, and Yoshino and Kwanzan are the two most common types.
When cherry blossoms bloom
Flowering cherries bloom in early spring, and Yoshino, the tree everything else is timed against, blooms March to April. In Washington, where the bloom is watched most closely, the National Park Service defines peak bloom as the day 70 percent of the Yoshino blossoms are open, and that day most often falls between the last week of March and the first week of April, with recorded extremes of March 15 in 1990 and April 18 in 1958. Warmth pulls the date forward and cold holds it back, and cold winters favor a good bloom while warmth followed by snow and freeze does the damage. A late frost on March 14 to 16, 2017 cost roughly half the Yoshino blossoms at the Tidal Basin.
How far your own date sits from Washington depends mostly on latitude. Cherry trees in New England open some 20 days later than the capital, and in Georgia, Tennessee and Texas a week and a half to two weeks earlier. In Japan the spread is wider still, with blossoms opening as early as January on Okinawa and as late as May on Hokkaido, while Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka run to late March or early April. Year to year the start of that season typically shifts by plus or minus one week, and mild weather in the weeks before it brings the flowers forward. The long trend in the Brooklyn collection is for the trees to blossom a little earlier each year, which the garden attributes to climate change.
Within one town the season runs as a sequence spread over weeks, which is the answer to whether April is too late. 'Okame' opens its mildly fragrant rosy pink flowers before the other cherries, early enough that a late freeze can harm them. Weeping Japanese cherry flowers about a week before the Yoshinos, and Yoshino opens alongside Akebono, a mutation of it with single pale pink blossoms that flowers at the same time. Kwanzan comes into bloom two weeks after Yoshino, and the latest cultivars, usually 'Kanzan' and 'Ukon', close a season that runs about a month from the earliest bloomer to the last. A few trees chosen from different ends of that order will hold flower in one garden for weeks.
Cherry blossom season city by city
Bloom windows for the American places that publish them, with the regional offset from Washington where a city keeps no window of its own.
How long cherry blossoms last
One tree blooms for about a week, and a whole grove blooms and drops in about two. On the Tidal Basin the Yoshinos bloom for several days, cool calm weather stretches the display, and a rainy windy day ends it abruptly. Published figures disagree, 2 to 3 weeks of white flower against the several days recorded at the Tidal Basin. In Japan the sequence is counted more plainly: full bloom arrives about one week after the first blossoms open, and about a week after that the petals are falling, with strong wind and rain cutting it shorter still. The word for that ending is hanafubuki, the blizzard of falling petals.
Buds give warning before any of it starts, passing through five recorded stages, green bud, florets visible, extension of florets, peduncle elongation and puffy blossoms, and at that last stage pink blossoms are visible erupting from the wide green bases of each node on the twig. Flower form changes the answer as well, since double-flowered cherries hold their bloom longer than single-flowered ones, while Yoshino flowers can be damaged by late frosts or very windy conditions. Color moves while the flowers are open, many cherries dark pink in bud, lighter pink as they open and pale pink or white by the end. Across a mixed planting the whole season stretches about a month from the earliest cultivar to the latest, even though any single tree may hold bloom for only a week or two.
Types of cherry blossom trees worth telling apart
Nearly every flowering cherry sold in the United States is a grafted cultivar, so the label on the trunk decides the size, the flower and the week it opens. Cherry species carry five petals naturally, while cultivars bred for fuller blossoms carry many more, as many as 28 on a 'Kanzan', which is the difference between a tree that reads white from the road and one that reads solid pink.
Is that a cherry? Telling the spring blossom trees apart
Several trees get called cherry every April, and the tell is rarely the petal. Bark direction, flower size and the count of parts in the middle of the flower settle it faster than color does, and a magnolia in full flower is the one most often mistaken for a cherry from a car window.
Where to see cherry blossoms in the United States
Going to see cherry blossoms means picking a place and a week, and the week is the harder half. A public planting is built from a few cultivars that open in order, so a park is white before it is pink and is never entirely in flower at once. The Tidal Basin in Washington is the largest single draw, with eleven species of flowering cherry ringing the water and some 1.5 million people arriving during the spring celebration. Yoshino carries the peak there and Kwanzan comes into bloom two weeks behind it, which is why the water reads white first and turns pink after the crowds thin. One group rewards a walk away from the shoreline: the Usuzumi cherries in West Potomac Park came from a tree more than 1,400 years old in Gifu Prefecture that Japan declared a National Treasure in 1922, and their single white flowers turn grey as they age.
Timing a visit is a matter of watching, since a bloom date cannot be forecast more than 10 days ahead and the flowers follow the weather. That leaves two workable habits: book late and accept the risk, or go where the season is long because the collection was planted to run in relay. Brooklyn Botanic Garden is the second kind, and its two weeping higan cherries at the north end of Cherry Walk survive from the original 1921 planting and are among the oldest specimens in North America. Making an event of the bloom is an American habit as well as a Japanese one, and the first festival was held in Washington in 1935, to honor Japan's gift of some 3,000 trees.
What cherry blossoms mean
Cherry blossom stands for the fleeting, and the short bloom is the reason. In Japan flowering cherries, with their short blooming period, symbolize the ephemeral, and they are more likely to be planted in parks than in gardens, because hanami is a public picnic held under the trees. Those outdoor parties have been held since the late eighth century, and the flowers have long served as spiritual metaphors and a reminder to live in the present moment. The tree is the national flower of Japan and carries associations of life, good health and happiness. Flowering cherries are not traditional Japanese garden plants, and conifers, maples, azaleas and mosses are all far more common in the gardens themselves. In the United States a second reading sits on top of the first, since the Washington planting began as a gift of friendship between two peoples, which is why the big American plantings belong to cities and parks. The color readings, the poetry and the tattoo tradition are set out under cherry blossom meaning.
Height and spread
Flowering cherries are small to medium trees, and the number that decides the site is the spread, which on the largest of them matches the height. Yoshino sets the benchmark at 30 to 40 feet tall and 30 to 40 feet wide. Published widths for that one tree disagree by a wide margin, from 20 to 50 feet, with 24 to 60 feet of space asked for at planting, up to a potential 40 to 50 feet tall and wide, though most trees stay smaller. Take the wide end as the planning figure, because a cherry given half its mature width grows into a wall, a drive or a neighbor's fence, and a cherry is not a tree that takes hard cutting back. The Japanese flowering cherry sold under that name is about half the size at 15 to 25 feet tall and 15 to 25 feet wide, upright, wide spreading or weeping depending on which cultivar carries the label. Before digging, read the mature width and check what is already standing inside it.
Light
A flowering cherry wants full sun, which for this tree means six or more hours of direct sunlight a day. It will live in light shade and it will not flower well there, so a tree in full leaf with a thin scatter of blossom is usually a tree that lost its light to something taller. Far south the balance shifts a little: 'Okame' needs full sun but prefers filtered sun in the afternoon in the southern part of South Carolina, and it still blooms well in the Coastal Plains.
Water
Keep the roots of a cherry moist, because the tree does not tolerate a prolonged drought even though it handles heat and humidity. Yoshino carries that same split, comfortable in a humid summer and quick to suffer in a dry one, and regular irrigation through an extended drought is one of the habits that keeps disease and insect problems down on ornamental cherries. Wet ground is the more expensive mistake: the soil-borne diseases behind gradual yellowing and summer leaf drop, Phytophthora root rot and Verticillium wilt, are more common on wet soils.
Soil and pH
Ornamental cherry trees grow well in fertile, well-drained soil with a pH of 6.0 to 7.5. Texture matters less than drainage: Yoshino handles clay, loam, sand and shallow rocky ground provided the water moves through, while the Japanese flowering cherry prefers a moist, well-drained loam, wants good air circulation to keep disease risk down and will not tolerate poorly drained ground. Published advice on feeding splits in two: one position is adequate irrigation during extended drought and regular springtime fertilizer applications, the other is to fertilize only if a soil test shows a nutrient deficiency and to adjust pH only if the testing lab recommends it. In a lawn, mulch out as far as the limbs reach, because mowers and string trimmers easily damage the thin bark, and keep broadleaf weed killers away from the root zone.
USDA hardiness: can you grow one where you live?
Cherry blossom trees grow across most of the United States, and the zone that matters is the one printed on the tree you buy. Sargent cherry is the coldest hardy of the common flowering cherries at zones 4 to 7, 'Autumnalis' Higan cherry is rated 4 to 8, and 'Kanzan' carries the widest range of them at zones 5 to 9. Yoshino is usually given as zones 5 to 8, listed elsewhere as 5a through 8b, and in one place as hardy only to zone 6. 'Okame' carries the same kind of split, rated zones 6 to 8 in one place and hardy to zones 5 and 6 in another. In the coldest gardens the list comes down to those first two.
Heat and humidity set the other boundary. Sargent cherry is somewhat intolerant of both and generally does not grow well south of zone 7, while Yoshino tolerates heat and humidity though not drought, and Higan cherry has better tolerance for summer heat and winter cold than most flowering cherries. On the coast the ranking changes again: in South Carolina 'Kwanzan', 'Shirotae' and 'Shogetsu' are poor selections for coastal areas while 'Okame' blooms well even in the Coastal Plains, and Taiwan cherry suits the Coastal Plains as well. Surviving a zone is not the same as flowering in it, and what costs a bloom is warmth followed by snow and freeze.
Planting a cherry blossom tree
Plant a flowering cherry in an open site with full sun, or at least six to eight hours of sunlight each day, in ground that drains and sits between pH 6.0 and 7.5. Leave air on every side of it, because crowded trees trap humidity and keep their leaves wet for a longer period of time. Mulch after planting, no more than 2 to 3 inches deep and held 6 inches clear of the base of the trunk, which is what prevents vole damage, borer problems and trunk diseases. Water whenever the week has brought less than an inch of rain, keeping soil moisture even through the first seasons. Where winters bring deep snow, wrap the lower trunk in hardware cloth and run it 2 to 3 inches below soil level, since voles girdle and kill a young cherry by feeding at the base.
The other half of the job is buying a tree worth planting. The cheap weeping cherries sold at home improvement stores are usually weeping higan branches grafted onto a straight cherry trunk cut off at five feet, and they are often weak and unhealthy before they ever reach a garden. Poor planting stock sits on the same list as drought, physical damage to the trunk and compacted or poorly drained soil, and anything on that list encourages insect problems, borers above all, and disease. Read the first two seasons with that in mind, because most problems on a tree in the ground under two years are not caused by a disease or an insect. The likelier causes are the dull ones: planting too deeply, too much mulch, compacted soil, root damage from digging around the roots, drought and excessive rainfall.
Which cherry blossom tree fits your yard
Five questions settle which flowering cherry belongs in a given yard, and they answer best in this order, because cold and space rule out more trees than color ever does. Where none of the answers lands on a cherry, the wider catalog of flower types covers what else fills the same weeks.
How flowering cherries are propagated, and how long they live
Flowering cherries are multiplied by grafting, which is why every tree of one cultivar flowers like the last. 'Kanzan' is sterile and produces no fruit at all, so there is no seed to collect even for a gardener who wanted to try, and nursery trees are worked onto a separate understock, sometimes top grafted at the 4 to 6 foot level so the flowering head sits on a straight trunk grown by a different plant. Two things follow for an owner: growth rising from the base or from the bare trunk belongs to the understock, so it never turns into the tree on the label, and a failing cherry cannot be started again from its own suckers the way a shrub can. The short life these trees are known for has as much to do with their wood as with their genetics, since the bark is thin and easily damaged, the trunk is prone to splitting, and the Japanese flowering cherry is listed as a tree that can be short-lived on exactly those grounds. Higan cherry is the exception, among the most heat, cold and stress tolerant of all the cherries and longer lived than most.
Pruning without losing next spring
Prune a flowering cherry as little as possible, and prune it straight after it flowers. Pruning is seldom necessary except to remove dead or diseased wood, or crossing branches that rub against each other, and those crossing or rubbing branches should be cut immediately after flowering so the following year's flower display is not reduced, while dead or diseased wood can come out at any time of year. The same timing is given elsewhere, prune after flowering if pruning is needed at all, with the note that these trees generally require little pruning. Nothing here calls for shaping cuts or a shortened crown. The gains are worth having: pruning improves air circulation within the tree, which reduces the potential for foliar diseases, it improves tree strength and induces branching, and it removes dead or broken branches that would otherwise encourage disease and insect problems. Water sprouts and root suckers come out as well, whenever they appear.
Pests and diseases of flowering cherries
Borers are the pest that kills flowering cherries outright. Peachtree borer larvae grow into thick-bodied grubs about an inch long with brown heads that burrow through the inner bark at or just below the base of the tree, where one borer can kill a small tree and two or more may kill a larger one. Gummosis, the oozing of sap from wounds caused by borers, mechanical injury, stress or cankers, is the sign to read, and disease gummosis is told apart from insect and mechanical damage because it carries no sawdust or pieces of bark mixed into the sap. Beyond borers the list is long, with aphids, scales, spider mites, leafhoppers, caterpillars, Japanese beetles and tent caterpillars on the insect side, and dieback, leaf curl, root rot, fire blight, leaf spot, twig cankers, black knot, galls and powdery mildew among the diseases.
Black knot appears as black, gnarled swellings along twigs and branches, easiest to find after the leaves drop in fall and through winter, and the answer is to prune out and dispose of the infected wood below the visible damage. Brown rot is a fungal infection that attacks flowering cherries, 'Kwanzan' in particular, later in spring just as the flowers are starting to fade. Cherry shot hole disease punches tiny round holes about an eighth of an inch across in the leaves, runs worse through a wet spring, and finishes with leaves turning yellow and falling early, which is the sequence behind the common complaint of a young cherry standing nearly bald by late summer.
What actually goes wrong, ranked
Ranked by how often each came up across forty-nine gardener threads, a sample that leans to one large gardening forum and was counted from thread titles. Two groups sit outside the ranking: ten threads asking which cherry to buy and how large it grows, which is a purchase question, and three on when to prune, which the pruning section answers.
Eleven threads, the largest group, weeping forms most of all. What the threads describe: branches that leaf out thin or not at all, bare limbs in a canopy that looked sound the year before. Management: start with the nonliving causes, since drought, excessive rainfall, weather extremes, low sunlight, compacted soil, planting too deeply, too much mulch and root damage account for a large share of the problems on these trees; check the base for borers, where one grub can kill a small tree; look for cankers, which enter through insect feeding, lawnmower wounds, frost cracks or hail damage; and white, fan-shaped fungal mats between the bark and the wood mean Armillaria root rot, with infected trees tending to collapse in mid-summer.
Nine threads. What the threads describe: full leaf and few or no blooms, sometimes a scatter of flowers low on the tree and nothing in the top half. Management: rule out the weather first, since a late frost can prevent the trees from blooming at all, then work down the checks that follow.
Six threads. What the threads describe: bark stripped low on the trunk, torn twigs, a newly planted tree rocked loose after a buck has worked it over. Management: ornamental flowering fruit trees may need protection from deer, with hardware cloth used to loosely enclose the trunk and commercial repellents rotated where deer pressure is heavy.
Four threads. What the threads describe: foliage yellowing gradually and dropping in summer. Management: scrape a little bark and look underneath, because browning tissue points to Phytophthora root rot or Verticillium wilt, both more prevalent on wet soils.
Two threads. What the threads describe: amber gum at or just below ground level, often with sawdust-like grit in it. Management: gum carrying frass is borer work, and the gum itself is produced by the tree as a defensive response to the injury.
Why a cherry blossom tree stops blooming
Bloom failure on an established cherry is almost always weather, light or a badly timed cut, in that order. Work down these checks before treating the tree for anything.
Toxicity and pet safety
Cherry is toxic to pets, and the danger sits in the parts nobody plants the tree for. The ASPCA lists cherry, meaning the genus Prunus as a whole, as toxic to dogs, cats and horses, with cyanogenic glycosides as the toxic principle. The stems, leaves and seeds contain cyanide and are particularly toxic in the process of wilting, and the clinical signs recorded are brick red mucous membranes, dilated pupils, difficulty breathing, panting and shock. The warning is not limited to one species, since the leaves, stems and seeds of the Japanese flowering cherry carry the same caution for cats, dogs and horses. What the lists name is stems, leaves and seeds, so a lawn covered in fallen blossom is a different matter from a pile of prunings by the fence.
Do cherry blossoms smell of anything?
Cherry blossom scent is faint at best, and on many cultivars there is none at all. Yoshino is the one usually described as fragrant, with flowers carrying a slight almond fragrance. Past that the sources disagree: 'Kwanzan' is called showy, unscented and double pink in the same listing that calls Yoshino's flowers slightly fragrant, and another marks the Yoshino and 'Okame' flowers as fragrant but not 'Kanzan'. 'Shirotae', sold as Mount Fuji, is described as semi-double, pink and fragrant in early season in one place and as white semi-double flowers that turn pinkish before the petals fall in another, so even the color is contested on that one. None of it competes with a lilac hedge in May, and what scent there is has to be met under the branches.
Cherry branches forced indoors
Cutting branches to open indoors is the one way to have cherry blossom before the tree is ready to give it. Forcing can be done as soon as the buds begin to swell in late winter, and cherry sits among the fruit trees suited to it. No published figure times cherry itself, and the trees that are timed run one to three weeks for forsythia and two to four for apple and crabapple, with the wait shortening the closer it gets to the plant's own outdoor flowering.
Cherry blossom myths worth dropping
Four beliefs come up almost every time a flowering cherry is bought, and each one leads somewhere costly.
The myth: Cherry blossom trees grow cherries you can eat.
The reality: Some of them fruit, but not for a kitchen. Yoshino follows its flowers with small black cherries about half an inch across, bitter to people and loved by birds, and the fruit of Sargent cherry is bitter and inedible fresh off the tree.
The myth: Straight shoots from the base mean a weeping cherry is reverting and can be trained back.
The reality: Those are water sprouts and root suckers thrown by the understock below the graft, and the standing instruction is to prune them out. Nothing that rises from below the graft will ever weep.
The myth: Flowering cherries are deer resistant.
The reality: Published ratings contradict each other. Yoshino cherry is listed as frequently damaged by deer while the Japanese flowering cherry is tagged deer resistant, and ornamental flowering fruit trees carry a general warning that they may need protection from deer. In deer country, treat a young tree as vulnerable.
The myth: The cherry trees at the Tidal Basin are the original trees Japan sent.
The reality: The line survives; most of the trees do not. Japan sent a second gift of 3,800 Yoshino trees in 1965, many of them planted on the Washington Monument grounds, and four hundred trees propagated from the surviving trees of the first donation were planted between 2002 and 2006 so the original genetic lineage continues.
What to expect year by year
What the first decade looks like on a flowering cherry planted from a nursery tree.
Year one belongs to the roots. Expect little top growth and a thin scatter of flowers at best, because the tree is spending on establishment, and expect to water it through the first dry spells. Speed arrives after that, and Yoshino's growth rate is rated rapid while its maintenance is rated high.
By the third and fourth spring the canopy reads as a tree and the bloom is worth stopping the car for. A Japanese flowering cherry may put on about 10 feet in 10 years, fast enough that a spacing mistake shows up early and slow enough that nothing needs cutting back to fix it. This is also the stretch when the trunk is most worth protecting, since the bark is still thin and a single mower strike lasts the life of the tree.
The last stretch is where the published numbers stop agreeing. An average of 15 to 20 years is given for the Japanese flowering cherry and for Yoshino, 20 to 25 years is the figure for a tree in a typical landscape, and 30 to 40 years the span reported for most cultivars. Which end of that a given tree reaches is decided mostly by what has hit its trunk over the years.
Flower photos
FAQ
Can you grow a cherry blossom tree in the USA?
Yes, and in most of the country the question is which one. Sargent cherry holds the cold end at zones 4 to 7 and 'Kanzan' the warm end at zones 5 to 9. On the humid coastal south the cultivar matters more than the zone, since 'Kwanzan' and 'Shogetsu' rate as poor selections there while 'Okame' blooms well.
Is there a difference between a cherry tree and a cherry blossom tree?
They are close relatives grown for opposite reasons. Ornamental flowering cherries sit in the same genus as the orchard trees but are grown for the spring flowers and the form of the tree, and most cultivars of the Japanese flowering cherry bear no fruit at all.
Which month is cherry blossom month?
March and April across most of the country. In Washington, where the count is kept, peak most often falls between the last week of March and the first week of April, and where several cultivars are planted together the local season runs about a month from the first to the last.
Is April too late to see cherry blossoms?
Rarely, because the late doubles carry the back half of the season. Kwanzan comes into bloom two weeks after Yoshino, and 'Shirofugen' and 'Shogetsu' flower later still.
Why do cherry blossoms only last two weeks?
The flowers open together and go over together. Full bloom arrives about a week after the first blossoms open and the petals are falling a week after that, and one rainy, windy day ends the display abruptly.
What is the most common type of cherry blossom tree?
Yoshino, by a wide margin wherever the trees are counted. It accounts for roughly 70 percent of the cherries in the Washington park.
What is the prettiest cherry blossom tree?
That is taste, and the two usual answers are opposites. Yoshino carries single white flowers, sometimes tinged pink, in clusters of two to five, while 'Kanzan' carries deep pink double flowers to 2.5 inches across with 20 to 30 petals.
What state has the most cherry blossom trees?
No published count ranks the states. What is on record is the county: Macon-Bibb in Georgia holds the largest concentration of cherry trees of any United States county.
Are cherry blossom trees difficult to grow?
They ask little of the soil and wound easily, which is the whole difficulty. Yoshino is rated a rapid grower with high maintenance, and the bark is thin and easily damaged while the trunk is prone to splitting.
Are cherry blossoms poisonous to dogs?
Yes. Cherry is listed as toxic to dogs, cats and horses, and the risk climbs after a cut, because the stems, leaves and seeds are at their most toxic while wilting. Clear prunings and storm-broken limbs away from where an animal can chew them.
What is so special about cherry blossoms?
The bloom is brief and it happens all at once. In Japan the short flowering period made the tree a symbol of the ephemeral, and the outdoor parties held beneath it since the late eighth century turned the flower into a reminder to live in the present moment.
Interesting tips
- The same tree is sold under a third name, 'Sekiyama', so two benches at one nursery can carry a single cultivar under labels that look like three different trees.
- A cherry can be named with no flower on it. Look at the leaf stalk, which carries two or more large wart-like glands near its tip, usually touching the base of the blade or sitting on the lower blade margin.
- The bloom forecasts published in Japan track one clone, since the dates refer to Somei Yoshino trees. That is why a single cultivar's calendar stands in for a whole country, and why a garden of mixed cherries keeps its own schedule.
Related Guides & Flowers
Cherry blossom meaning
What the flower stands for, how the colors read, and why a bloom this short carries so much of the symbolism.
Magnolia
The other early flowering tree people mistake for a cherry from the road, and what it asks for in a yard.
Lilacs
The spring shrub grown for scent, for anyone who wanted perfume from a cherry and did not get it.
Pink flowers
Where the cherry sits among pink bloomers, and what opens in that range before and after it.
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