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Cherry Trees Are Blooming In Jackson Park — But Not For Long

By Sam Cholke | April 18, 2017 3:23pm
 Jackson Park's cherry trees are still blooming for a little bit longer.
Jackson Park Cherry Trees
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HYDE PARK — It’s not too late to see the spring flush of pink and white flowers on Jackson Park’s cherry trees.

The park doesn’t attract the throngs of Japan’s many festivals or the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C., but it would be a shame to miss the substantial and simultaneous flowering in Jackson Park.

More than 100 cherry trees are scattered around the park’s lagoons, with the largest group shedding white petals into the Columbia Basin immediately south of the Museum of Science and Industry.

Those trees are now nearly done flowering, but a trip to Wooded Island reveals more around the Japanese garden, these still heavy with the pink blossoms iconic of the Japanese cherry trees.

In Jackson Park, the flowering of the cherry trees signals the end of the earliest flowering of Siberian squill’s small blue flowers carpeting the still sunny bases of the largest trees, now being replaced by the flush of violets.

The trees in the park are a mix of some planted years ago as well as others planted in 2013 through donations from a Japanese business group.


The cherry tree bloom in Jackson Park, though large, often goes uncelebrated. 


The trees around the Japanese garden on Wooded Island show more of the pink that mark Japanese cherry trees.


Trees with white blossoms line the banks of the Columbia Basin behind the Museum of Science and Industry.