Cherry blossom trees are known as “sakura” in Japan, and there, the blooms are symbols of renewal and hope. Picnicking beneath the trees is a longstanding Japanese tradition, which is known as “hanami.”
How To Grow And Care For Cherry Blossom Trees
Plus, some trivia about the beautiful blooming trees that are some of the first signs of spring.
Updated on May 24, 2023
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Khara Scheppmann has 12 years of marketing and advertising experience, including proofreading and fact-checking. She previously worked at one of the largest advertising agencies in the southwest.
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One of the earliest harbingers of spring is the cherry blossom tree, which bursts into pink and white clouds of blooms in March and April. They’re celebrated at cherry blossom festivals around the world when people flock to the grasses beneath their branches to marvel at the frothing blooms. There are several varieties of these ornamental trees that grow well in the South, so if you’d like to learn more about how to plant and care for these beautiful trees, read on. Be sure to study up on some cherry blossom facts before the next spring bloom. Plus, find a bit of tree-related trivia to test your knowledge about these blossoming signs of warm weather to come. Whether you’re visiting a cherry blossom festival or planning to plant one in your front yard as an ornamental addition to your landscaping, there’s lots to know about cherry blossoms. One thing to keep in mind for pet owners: Seeds, leaves, and stems of cherry blossom trees are toxic to dogs, cats, and horses, so be aware if planning to plant them.
Plant Attributes
Most ornamental cherry trees are bred more for the lovely blossoms than for the edible fruit. The strictly ornamental genus of cherry trees is known as Prunus. These trees still produce fruit in the summer months, but it’s usually so sour that only animals eat it. Cherry trees that produce edible fruits are in the genus Rosaceae, but most of them are too difficult to grow in the South. That’s because they need cool temperatures to thrive, and the Southern climes don’t reach or stay at the temperatures they require to blossom.
Contrary to popular belief, most cherry blossoms do have a light fragrance. Cherry blossoms bloom in several shades. Many are light pink, while others have darker pink flowers or white flowers, depending on several factors. Some have yellow-green or white-green blooms that turn pink as they age.
The trees grow and establish themselves relatively quickly, but they don’t last very long. Their life spans are usually from 15 to 25 years long, though in optimal conditions, they have been known to reach 30-40 years of age. On the other hand, some (like black cherry trees) can live much longer. Black cherries have been known to reach 250 years old under the right conditions.
Although their looks are delicate, you can actually grow them for yourself, assuming that you place your cherry blossom trees in a location with full sun and well-drained soil. Well-draining soil is key, as cherry blossoms don’t like to sit in water and let their roots get soggy. Some gardeners find that sandy or clay-enriched soils can work for cherry blossoms and aid in drainage. However, many gardeners believe that loamy soil is best for growing cherry blossoms because it is rich and well-draining.
Light
Cherry blossom trees grow best in full sun, with at least six hours of direct sunlight a day. Some varieties will tolerate some shade. In areas prone to droughts, be sure to plant the tree in a location where it will get partial shade, and mulch around the base to retain moisture.
Soil
Cherry blossom trees can adapt to a variety of soil types, including sandy and clay options, but they prefer moist, well-drained acidic soil. Mulch around the base of the tree, up to but not touching the trunk, to help it retain moisture without encouraging too much water collection.
Water
Water young trees weekly, twice weekly during dry weather, to help them get established. After the first two seasons, watering every two weeks is sufficient, with more watering during droughts. Long soakings are better for these trees than quick showers.
Temperature and Humidity
Most cherry blossom trees need winters that aren’t too harsh. Cool temperatures of about 45°F are essential for the dormancy period that allows them to blossom in the spring. Warmer temperatures during late winter may bring earlier spring blooms. The trees can tolerate Southern summers, but they need more frequent watering during hot, dry months.
Fertilizer
Test the soil to see if your tree has any deficiencies that require fertilizer. If modification or enrichment is needed, a slow-release fertilizer specifically designed for cherry or ornamental flowering trees may be applied once every spring.
Types Of Cherry Blossom Trees
There are many different varieties of these beautiful trees. The Yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) is the dominant selection that surrounds the Washington Tidal Basin and has a whole festival dedicated to it. It can grow up to 35 feet tall. The Weeping cherry (P. x subhirtella) can have pink or white flowers and comes in a variety of sizes. The branches spill downward, like a weeping willow tree or water issuing from a fountain.
The ‘Okame’ cherry (P. ‘Okame’) produces deep pink blossoms and grows to 20 feet tall with branches stretching up in a traditional, rounded tree form. It can be an early bloomer and sometimes blossoms as early as Valentine’s Day in the warmer temperatures of the lower South. The ‘Kwanzan’ cherry (P. serrulata ‘Kwanzan’) is a vigorous grower with frilly blooms that look like carnations. It’s usually a late bloomer that flowers in mid-to-late spring and can reach heights of up to 30 feet tall.
Damien Hirst on painting cherry blossom: ‘It’s taken me until I’m 55 to please my mum’
The former hell-raising, hard-partying YBA known for slicing animals in half is now painting trees in bloom. Has he lost his edge? And why is his hair blue?
Tue 6 Jul 2021 15.46 CEST Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 16.08 CEST
T he first thing that hits me when I see Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms isn’t the scale (monumental) or the palette (psychedelic) but the paint itself. It’s thick, sticky and a little bit nasty. Creamy-white and dusty-pink daubs swirl from the surface like meringue kisses, fragile and sugary sweet. Others are more chewy, like dried gum. Then there are the viscous splats of mustard-yellow and brown, which are toe deep and remind me of something I side-stepped on the pavement this morning.
“I think the idea of being a painter has always appealed to me,” says Hirst, who is more famous for what we might call his non-canvas work. “I suppose it’s that old story of Turner being strapped to a mast during a storm so he could paint it – it’s a romantic thing.”
Hirst has, of course, wielded a brush before, but it wasn’t until he’d finished coordinating his 2017 extravaganza Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable – which was a decade in the making, required an army of assistants and filled two museums in Venice – that he started to crave time alone in the studio. “I like being by myself if I know what I’m doing,” he says. “With this, I worked out the whole series, then there were three years of intense painting.” It’s as if he’d known lockdown was coming.
Hirst was invited to show his Cherry Blossoms at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2019. General director Hervé Chandès stumbled upon a couple of his new paintings on Instagram and swiftly engineered a studio visit. The exhibition – Hirst’s debut in a French museum – was supposed to take place last June, then this spring, and now it’s just opened. The artist and I chat on the Fondation’s top floor, where I find him signing posters. He’s dressed for the occasion in a pale pink suit, his close-cropped hair dyed sky blue. As I take a seat, he tells me his girlfriend was getting blond highlights and the hairdresser had some blue dye, so he did it on a whim. “I thought about going pink but decided it might be too much with the Cherry Blossoms.” Too much? Those are two words I never thought I’d hear from the original enfant terrible of the Young British Artists.
Out of 107 paintings, 30 are on display. The first space I enter overlooks a garden, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows letting in natural light and engaging Hirst’s artificial trees in conversation with real ones swaying in the summer breeze. On the ground floor, different-sized canvases take a wide-angle view of branches in bloom, while in the basement every image is a closeup. Throughout, the works toggle between figuration and abstraction. “From afar I wanted them to look like trees,” says Hirst, “and up close I wanted them to disappear and fall into crazy amounts of paint. Whenever anything became a bit laboured, I’d just chuck paint on top.”
You start off crazy and wild, then you slow down and become more stable
He applied it with sticks and brushes – “whatever I had at hand” – and often from the other end of his studio. “I’d go really far back and throw it. And I’d have paintings either side as well, so when I was working on one, I was getting paint on another.” The foundation’s white walls and cement floors might be squeaky clean, but in London it’s another matter: “I’ve got to scrape my windows soon, I think, otherwise I’ll be working in a pitch-black room.”
It’s a surprising approach, given that Hirst has for the past 20 years been sticking to a precise grid with his Spot Paintings, which look machine-made. “I wanted that series to be bright and celebratory,” he says. “I didn’t want anybody to be able to criticise it – that’s where the grid came in. I realised it was difficult to criticise a grid.”
It was also about taking control of colour and exploring his love of minimalism: “I’ve loved it for years, but there’s something wrong with it. You kind of want the circles to collapse and break down.” He says the loose and uninhibited Cherry Blossoms feel more “him” right now. “It’s a different kind of painting, a different kind of chaos.”
The Cherry Blossoms are bound to be a hit with Hirst’s mum. “When I was making the animals in formaldehyde, she said, ‘Oh, there’s enough horror in the world, can’t you do paintings of flowers?’ And I think, my God, it’s taken me until I’m 55 before I can please her.”
But they’re more than paintings of flowers. They are exuberant and life-affirming but also excessive and messy. As Hirst says, some people think cherry blossoms are about life and others think they’re about death. “They bring together the past, present and future, everything we love and everything we hate. Even though there are no dead sharks to be seen, I still find them an assault on the senses. I still find them aggressive and violent.” He adds: “In the first few paintings, I laid out a set of pinks and a set of whites. After that, they became a riot.”
The subject matter springs in part from a memory of Hirst’s mum painting a cherry tree in blossom when he was three or four: he remembers thinking the blobs looked easy enough to replicate. It’s also a continuation of the entirely abstract Veil Paintings he showed in Los Angeles in 2018: he tried to create a sense of depth and ended up seeing gardens in the shimmering dabs of paint.
Hirst’s painterly ability has been questioned in the past, but when you’re portraying imperfect nature you can allow yourself some wriggle room. My favourites here are the canvases given room to breathe, the summer sky providing some reprieve from the frothy blossom and tangled branches. The largest work is 5.5 metres tall and 7.3 metres wide (18ft x 24ft), comprises four panels and has a whole wall to itself. My eye snags on a putty-like splat, then glides along a skinny branch before getting caught on a fleck of bright white. Elsewhere, a diptych brings together two halves of a flowering tree, its trunk bisected. Remind you of anything?
Hirst’s habit of chopping things in half persists, but he’s dialled down the shock factor. “All my favourite art, if I look back at any artist, is like a map of a person’s life,” he says. “You start off crazy and wild, then you slow down and become more stable.”
I’m reminded of something he said earlier about never liking the term “YBA” because he knew that one day it would be replaced by “OAP”. I ask if he’s mellowed and, after thinking for a moment, he says he’s a bit wiser and more patient.
“I guess in the beginning,” he says, “with the drinking and the partying and the drugs, I felt immortal. I thought: ‘This is going to last for ever, nothing can stop me.’ Then – boom – it kind of hits you and you think: ‘That’s not where I am any more.’ But I’ve still got that streak of wanting to change the world and wanting to reinvent myself.”
