March 29, 2023. Yesterday we featured quite small single pink ‘Okame’ flowers, notable for their red calyx tubes and red stamens (You can find this posting in the blog at Yesterday’s news – ‘Okame’ – Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival (vcbf.ca)). Here are single pink blossoms from four more cultivars that are in bloom around town now.
‘Whitcomb’ cherries have been out for a while, are a widely-planted early-blooming cherry and have been featured here before. Anne Eng photographed these at VanDusen Botanical Garden, where the micro-climate is cooler than most places in and around Vancouver, so they are still looking fresh.
Tan Yong Hui photographed these rare-to-the-area ‘Shosar’ blossoms at Minoru and Landsdowne in Richmond. The shape and colour of the calyx tube helps to distinguish these cultivars from each other.
Here is ‘Beni-shidare’, photo from Gibsons by Shirley Willard. The name means “pink weeping”, which pretty much gives it away – single pink flowers on drooping branches. Locally, the esthetic seems to be to prune these heavily so you can see under them, but they are most beautiful when the branches are allowed to cascade to the ground. These are popular landscape trees, and there is a large collection of them at VanDusen Botanical Garden.
The ‘Stellata’ or Star Cherry’s distinctive characteristic are the rolled edges of the flowers, making them look like little stars. These also have red calyces, making the trees seem more noticeably red than they are. Once the flowers open, they are a very pale pinky-white. Tan Yong Hui took this photo of flowers emerging at Vanier Park.
