Vancouver Cherry Blossom FestivalPresented by
April 7, 2026 Mid-season blooms are opening quickly now. Double-flowered ‘Shirotae’ are are still wowing us. These are often beautiful wide-spreading trees, and they can grow quite large. Their leaves start to open with the flowers, giving the trees an over-all warmer colour. Thanks to Cherry Scouts Anne Eng and Tao Yan for the photos.
The VCBF once again has offered up our ‘Akebono’ trees at Maple Grove Park, for the fifth year of the International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition. More information about the challenge can be found at https://competition.statistics.gmu.edu/. The contestants needed to predict the blooming dates for the participating locations. As well, they competed against models created by artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. The contestants submitted their predictions by the end of February, and we are now waiting for the trees.
We will show you how our Maple Grove Park trees are progressing toward their peak bloom. Douglas Justice has sent in our first photos, taken March 12. We had a warm winter, no freezing, no snow, until last week when we had temperatures near freezing and a dusting of snow. Bud break is complete, a week before last year.
March 21, temperatures have been around 10 degrees, but days have been dark and rainy, until yesterday of glorious sunshine and soggy ground. Douglas Justice took these photos yesterday, but driving by today, he thought they had progressed to 40%. The trees facing the road are a little farther along – they might drag down the over-all percentage.
March 22, photos here are only two days after the previous ones. The blossoms now beckon from a block away. The trees have a lot of buds still, but they’re looking beautiful. Photos are by Wendy Cutler.
March 23, one day later, Douglas Justice reports we’re at 60%.
March 25, peak bloom is hard to call, with one tree considerably behind the others. The young tree, which we’re not including, is ahead of the others. Photos are by Douglas Justice.
This set of photos were taken just a little later on the same day as the ones above. Douglas Justice has called the peak bloom for March 27, another two days after these latest photos that show a lot of buds, with the middle tree holding back the average (and the young 4th tree that was leading the pack not included). At the beginning of last week, we were predicting an earlier peak bloom, but temperatures got cold, down to freezing the night of March 25, and few sunny breaks the next two days.
Thanks to VCBF cherry scout Leanne Fong for sharing this set of photos.
You can see photos of the blooming progression from last year at Yesterday’s news – 2025 International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition – Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival.
March 21, 2026 Single white flowers: ‘Somei-yoshino’, and ‘Akebono’, a similar-looking offspring opening with more of a pinkish cast to the over-all appearance. Here are a photo of each, taken on the same block. Photos were posted on our forums by Shirley Willard.
March 26, 2026 More photos of ‘Somei-yoshino’, and ‘Akebono’, the latter similar-looking, opening with more of a pinkish cast to the over-all appearance. Here are a photo of each. Photos were posted on our forums by Leanne Fong.
March 18, 2026 Double-flowered ‘Accolade’ have not been showing well this year, but the flowers are still beautiful. Here is Taka Naidu’s photo.
March 13, 2026 More early single pink flowers, these on trees with a weeping habit. They are known in Japan as ito-zakura, or thread cherries. The flowers on this species can be white or pink, as in the first photo below. Commonly seen in our location is a cultivar with deep pink blossoms called ‘Beni-shidare’. Photos are by Shirley Willard and Wendy Cutler.
March 1, 2026 So far, the stars of this year’s show have been ‘Okame’ cherries, which bloom around the same time as ‘Whitcomb’ and the petals are the same colour, but the calyx tubes (behind the petals) on these are dark red, and they are long and slender, not bulbous as on ‘Whitcomb’ flowers. The petals are very small, and could be compared to the size of a Canadian penny, but we don’t have those any more. These are rarely planted around here, and they are mostly found as single specimens. And they don’t usually make as good an impression as our photographers have captured in these two photos. Kiri posted the first photo at the Fraser Parkade at UBC. May Lin’s photo is from Langley.
February 8, 2026 ‘Whitcomb’ cherries in the warmer neighbourhoods started looking in bloom on January 24 this year. Now, on February 8, there is still no freezing weather, so the blooms are hanging on. New flowers are opening, but still in the warm neighbourhoods, as the evenings have been well below 10C degrees. These flowers photographed by Shirley Willard are from a tree in Kitsilano.
April 30, 2025 We started the year with snow on pink ‘Whitcomb’ cherry blossoms; we’ll end the cherry blooming with pink ‘Kanzan’ snow on the sidewalks, evoking Mono no aware, the traditional symbolism of cherry blossoms as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life Thanks to Cynna Bartram on Facebook for sharing her photos celebrating the closing out of our season.
April 28, 2025 ‘Shiro-fugen’ trees are one of the last to bloom, and the flowers are one of the longest-lasting. They undergo the most extreme changes during their show. Dusky-pink buds on long stems open to pure white flowers backed by bronze-coloured leaves. Flowers are still white as the leaves become green. Then the flowers develop a fluorescent pink eye that bleeds out to the petals, eventually turning the flowers entirely pink, backed by green leaves. During this process, new white flowers are still opening, so there are both pink and white flowers. These are usually healthy wide-spreading trees, densely packed with blossoms.
