The appropriately-named Charlie Brown cherry tree on the DC Tidal Basin.

 

Cherry Blossom Festival, Spring 2021

The Cherry Blossom Festival in DC occurs in March or April every year. I put together some images and datasets to share via the NMNH social media accounts. Here are some images from the posts.

Here we see the branch of a Yoshino cherry tree (Prunus yedoensis) at the DC Tidal Basin with the Jefferson Memorial in the background. On March 19, we see that the buds have just starting growing into florets, but by March 29, the blossoms have already reached their peak (defined as >70% of Yoshino cherry blossoms open).

 

Cherry Blossom Data

We are very fortunate to have centuries of observations made by monks and others in Kyoto, Japan dating back to the 9th century. Here, I plotted publicly available flowering data, and we can see that over the past 500 years, the full-flowering date in Kyoto has shifted earlier and earlier. The peak bloom date this year was March 26; the last time it was this early was several hundred years ago, indicating the effects of climate change.

Phenology for 15th to 21st centuries was acquired and analyzed by Aono and Kazui (2008; International Journal of Climatology, 28, 905-914), and is available here: http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/