April 24 and we’ve caught up. A week to go in April and we have flowers on all the cultivars in our Ornamental Cherries book marked as blooming in mid-April, except for Birch Bark Cherry, which needs to be moved to the latest blooming time. I also don’t know about ‘Taki-nioi’, which is in Nitobe Garden, a particularly late-blooming area. And the late-April/May blooming ones have started to open. The blooming times are remarkably similar around the city now. My meetup walking group had a nice Easter Parade Cherry Walk in the rain today in the West End and Stanley Park. We saw at least some flowers on 18 cultivars: ‘Kanzan’, ‘Mikuruma-gaeshi’, Prunus Avium, ‘Takasago’, ‘Sendai-shidare’, ‘Yae-beni-shidare’, ‘Shirotae’, Yama-zakura, ‘Somei-yoshino’, ‘Akebono’, ‘Atsumori’, ‘Snow Goose’, ‘Umineko’, ‘Ukon’/’Gyoiko’, ‘Shujaku’, ‘Ojochin’, ‘Shogetsu’, and 'Amanogawa'. We saw some nice new shiny bark on an old Birch Bark Cherry but no flowers. I know there are some blossoms on the ‘Ichiyo’ and ‘Shirofugen’ but we didn’t go past those. Not a bad number of different cherries one can see on an afternoon’s walk. The festival is over for this year, and just in time, we've named one of our mystery cherries: Ichihara-tora-no-o - Double white, pink buds, green leaves, late mid-season. Thanks, Douglas.
