Vancouver Cherry Blossom FestivalPresented by
April 16, 2025 ‘Takasago’ trees almost always look awkward and diseased in Vancouver, but when they bloom, the flowers are so beautiful and densely packed that all is forgiven. They open, as shown here, with deep pink buds brightening to small pinky white double flowers. These will turn white, acquiring red eyes when they age. These uncommon trees have a few even more rare look-alikes. Their distinctive characteristic is their hairy, almost fuzzy, flower stems.
April 15, 2025 ‘Shirotae’ have been in bloom for a while. When the puffy double white flowers open, the trees appear bright white, but the flowers still look good when the leaves appear. These trees like to stretch out, can form a nice allee, all the better for you to catch their lovely fragrance.
April 12, 2025 ‘Tai-haku’. Yet another ornamental cherry with single white blossoms, but as with yesterday’s, these flowers are distinctive: these are large for cherry blossoms, up to 6cm across, large enough to not be obscured by the coppery new foliage (which will eventually turn to green). Some of these trees are impressively wide-spreading with hefty limbs.
April 10, 2025 We are still featuring single white blossoms, most of which look the same, requiring taking note of other features to identify the cultivar. But these fragrant ‘Washi-no-o’ flowers are very distinctive with their narrow petals not overlapping, and the jagged petal edges supposedly suggesting their Japanese name for eagle’s tail.
April 9, 2025 ‘Snow Goose’ has very white buds and flowers, with large long green sepals on the back that result in distinctively broad stars seen from the front of backlit flowers. The tree shape is also distinctive – quite narrow when young, broadening as the trees age, with upright branches curving outward at the tips of the branches on older trees. There is no observable way to distinguish these from the older ‘Umineko’, a cultivar created from the same parent trees.
April 7, 2025 We are back now to single white blossoms that all seem to look the same. But we can still distinguish the cultivars by the parts that look different. For instance, ‘Sendai-shidare’ is a small weeping tree with very distorted limbs. If you turn the flowers over, the long thin green sepals that form the star on the back are distinctive.
April 6, 2025 ‘Afterglow’ are rare in the area, planted along just a few whole blocks in Vancouver and Burnaby. They are always planted with ‘Akebono’ (featured yesterday) and are on the Vancouver city trees map as that cultivar. But jeez, Louise, the flowers are pink! And the petals are narrow, so they do not overlap to form a cup.
April 5, 2025 ‘Akebono’ are the most commonly seen cherry blossoms of the early mid-season. They have single (5-petaled) white flowers, very similar to ‘Somei-yoshino’ just featured here, but they sometimes have an extra petaloid (half-petal) seen in the centre of the flowers. Sometimes, you can find several of these petaloids, but often it will seem as if there is just one per tree. This photo shows petaloids in three of the flowers. When these trees approach peak bloom, they often have a pink appearance, particularly compared with the whiteness of ‘Somei-yoshino’. But as the flowers age, they will become white, while ‘Somei-yoshino’ flowers become pink when they age.
March 31, 2025 ‘ ‘Somei-yoshino’ usher us into mid-season blossoms. These can look similar to the fluffy ‘Akebono’ blossoms that are so widely-planted around here, but the flowers usually turn white while still in bud, and when the trees come into full bloom, they are much more white than ‘Akebono’.
March 26, 2025 ‘Accolade’ are up next. These beautiful semi-double flowers look their best when the pale pink flowers are still emerging surrounded by deep pink buds. These are opening late this year.
