Cherry Blossom Season in Vancouver

The pink blossoms are beautifying Vancouver

Vancouver is deep in cherry blossom season, with lots of fluffy pink blobs covering trees around the city.

After having recently returned from Tokyo where I saw some sakura, I am biased when I say the ones in Vancouver are much prettier!

The cherry blossoms in my neighbourhood

Our city is celebrating 100 years of cherry blossoms, as it was in 1925 when the mayors of Kobe and Yokohama presented the Vancouver Park Board with 500 trees of the Ojochin variety to plant at the cenotaph in Stanley Park in honour of the Japanese-Canadian veterans of World War I.

Then from the 1930s to the 1950s, the Park Board planted cherry tree seeds that were donated by Japanese Canadians, around Vancouver. 

Three hundred more cherry trees were donated in 1958 by the Japanese consul Muneo Tanabe as a symbol of friendship between Canada and Japan. The trees were planted along Cambie Street, between 33rd and 49th avenues, in Queen Elizabeth Park and around the cenotaph in Stanley Park.

In 1990 the Park Board did a comprehensive inventory of street trees and found nearly 36 percent of the 89,000 trees on city streets were flowering plum and cherry trees. 

Fluffy pink popcorn on trees

Every year Vancouver has the Cherry Blossom Festival, encouraging residents to check out the city in pink, write haiku and have a picnic, and learn more about cherry trees.

Despite the rain earlier this week, most of the cherry blossoms managed to hang onto their branches, dry off and continue to beautify the city. They and magnolias are also a treat to look at these days. Magnolia are also fleeting, as once they bloom, the petals fall off and that's the end of the season.

Cherry blossoms remind us to stop and appreciate the beauty around us, even if it might cause those of us with pollen allergies to have some sneezing episodes!

Picture of the Day: Cherry Blossoms

Cherry blossoms like pink popcorn on branches

Vancouver is turning pink! 

Cherry blossoms were coming into full bloom in Kerrisdale and I managed to take a few pictures.

They are definitely different from plum blossoms, which have fewer flowers and are darker in hue, whereas cherry blossoms are more dense in terms of petals and are hung in clumps that look kind of like pink popcorn hanging from branches!

There are thousands of cherry trees

For Vancouverites there's no need to go to Japan to see sakura -- we have over 43,000 cherry trees in the city. Hundreds were planted in the early 1930s by the mayors of Kobe and Yokohama in honour of Japanese Canadians who served in World War I. 

Then in 1935, immigrant Japanese couple Bunjiro and Kimi Uyeda donated a thousand young cherry trees to the Vancouver Park Board.

The city has thousands more cherry trees than the National Mall in Washington DC, which only has 3,800.

And it's not a Japanese city with the most cherry trees -- that honour goes to Changwon, South Korea with 360,000 trees.