A cherry branch in bud gives nothing away. The flower sits clenched inside scales of brown and green, no more expressive than any other bare winter twig. Then it opens, and the tree announces exactly what it is: five petals or thirty, white or a saturated pink, held upright or falling in long arcs, in bloom in January or not until May. Sakura is a family of several hundred wild and cultivated forms, and the differences between them are the reason Japan's spring lasts three months rather than ten days.
The word covers a mountainside that has flowered on its own since before Kyoto was the capital, and a single cloned tree bred in nineteenth century Tokyo that now stands, genetically identical, on tens of thousands of riverbanks. It covers a flower that hangs downward like a small bell and a flower stacked thirty petals deep. A visitor working from photographs alone pictures one cherry. Japan grows a calendar of them, each variety opening on its own schedule and closing before the next arrives.
A practised eye looks past colour to petal count, branch habit, and whether the leaves have already opened.
the clone
The clone that set the calendar
The Somei Yoshino is the tree most people picture: pale, almost white, five petals, a faint blush at the centre that deepens as the flower ages. Its branches open before the leaves, which is what gives full bloom its cloud like purity. For a few days the tree appears to be made of nothing but flower.
Its origin is specific and recent by the standards of a wild species. It is a hybrid of Edo higan, the tree botanists know as Prunus itosakura, and the Oshima cherry, Prunus speciosa, first selected in the nurseries of Somei village, in what is now Tokyo's Toshima ward. In 1900 the horticulturist Fujino Yorinaga gave it the name it carries today, drawn from that village and from Yoshino, the old byword for cherry blossom itself. In 2019 the Kazusa DNA Research Institute, working with Shimane University and Kyoto Prefectural University, sequenced its full genome and confirmed the parentage directly.
That hybrid origin left it self-incompatible and unable to breed true from seed, so every Somei Yoshino alive is a cutting or a graft, descended without a break from the original tree identified in Somei village. Cities treat this as inheritance rather than fragility. A new graft raised to replace an old riverbank planting is drawn from the same line that first opened in the nineteenth century, so the tree flowering over a modern moat is, cell for cell, the tree Tokyo has always had. And because a whole district is planted with the same genetic individual, the trees answer warmth in unison: they open together, peak together, fall together. The pale cloud along a river is one tree, repeated, behaving as one.
falling and wild
The falling branch and the wild tree
Shidarezakura, the weeping cherry, changes the flower's posture rather than its shape. Its branches fall in long arcs, so the blossom descends instead of spreading into a horizontal canopy. DNA work has traced the weeping habit back to Edo higan as well, the same species that gave Somei Yoshino its maternal line, though the two trees could hardly look less alike once grown. The name itosakura, thread cherry, appears in documents as old as the Heian period, long before Somei Yoshino existed. A mature shidarezakura in bloom has a body, not only a canopy. It shapes the space beneath it almost like architecture, a curtain rather than a ceiling.
Yamazakura, the mountain cherry, is older still in the Japanese imagination and needs no planting at all. It is the country's most widespread wild cherry, seeding itself across hillsides and forest edges rather than lining avenues, and it was the cherry of classical poetry centuries before Somei Yoshino was bred. The clearest way to know it is the leaf. Where Somei Yoshino flowers on bare wood and leafs out only afterward, yamazakura opens its pale pink or white blossom at the same moment as its new leaves, which emerge bronze or copper red rather than green. The effect is warmer and less uniform than the pale cloud of a cloned avenue: a hillside in soft pink and rust rather than a single sheet of white.
the early ones
The bloomers that will not wait
Kanhizakura opens before the rest of the country has finished with plum. Native to Taiwan and to Okinawa, it carries a deep fuchsia flower shaped like a narrow bell, and it hangs downward rather than opening flat, never quite unfurling into the star shape of Somei Yoshino. It can flower as early as January, appearing first in the cooler hill country of Okinawa's northern Motobu headland before working south to Naha over the following one to two weeks. Its whole season is finished before Honshū has left winter behind.
On the mainland, Kawazu zakura keeps the earliest calendar. Named for Kawazu, the town on the Izu headland in Shizuoka where it was first propagated, it opens from early February into March, a full month or more ahead of the Somei Yoshino front. Its petals run larger and a deeper pink than the pale national variety, and its bloom holds for close to a month rather than the usual week, so a single tree can carry buds, open flowers and fading petals all at once.
Ōshimazakura, the Oshima cherry, blooms paler and quieter than either. Its five white petals open at the same time as fresh green leaves, and it carries a distinct fragrance once those leaves are salted, which is why it supplies the wrapping for sakuramochi. It is one of the two wild species, alongside Edo higan, that stand behind Somei Yoshino, and it recurs again in the parentage of most of the double flowered garden cherries that close the season months later.
Sakura is a sequence of different flowers, each keeping its own clock.
the late fullness
Double flowers and the season's last word
Yaezakura, the double flowered cherries, belong to the Sato-zakura group, cultivated forms bred from Ōshimazakura crossed with yamazakura. They open one to two weeks after Somei Yoshino, carrying the season into mid and late April with a texture nothing like the pale cloud that came before. A double flower is unmistakable once it has been seen: more than the plain five petals of Somei Yoshino, sometimes many more, gathered into a rounded cluster closer to folded fabric than to a pale star.
Kanzan is the best known of them, its clusters built from thirty to fifty deep pink petals above coppery new leaves, dense enough that a mature branch reads almost solid with colour. Ichiyō carries around twenty petals in a lighter pink that fades toward white as the flower ages, and is named for a single leaf like pistil that shows at the centre of each bloom, distinct among the double varieties. Fugenzo layers roughly forty petals, white within and pink without, ageing to a colour close to white by the time it falls, its leaves slender and finely serrated rather than broad. None of the three needs to be memorised to be enjoyed. What matters is the principle behind them: the late doubles replace the first wave's airy lightness with abundance, arriving once the pale cloud has gone and the leaves of early summer are filling in around them.
Read together, the varieties turn sakura from a single famous week into a sequence that runs the length of spring. Kanhizakura opens the year in the south in January. Kawazu zakura follows on the mainland in February, holding its bloom for nearly a month. Somei Yoshino brings the whole country to its best known height in the turn from March into April, in near perfect unison because it is one cloned tree planted in many places. Shidarezakura and yamazakura keep company with it, one theatrical and cultivated, one wild and unplanted. Yaezakura closes the season a fortnight or more later, dense and deliberate where the first wave was pale and brief. None of this needs to be memorised on a first encounter with the flower. It only needs to be noticed that the branch in front of any viewer belongs to one part of a much longer season.
