[URBAN NOTE] "Cherry Blossoms Bloom at High Park"

[rfmcdonald]

A Bit More Detail isn't going to become an all-cherry blossom blog, but I thought readers who like my photos of the weekend and this morning might like Todd Aalgaard's Torontoist post about the High Park cherry blossoms. Extensive history, natural and otherwise, is included.

For a few days each spring, an arguably ironic thing happens in High Park. Hemmed in by winter for months, what feels like Toronto’s entire population spills into the park, eager to breathe air that doesn’t freeze the lungs—and, presumably, to feel a little closer to nature. But the result isn’t exactly the long exhale of spring that many expect.

Instead, it’s as if the city comes to a halting critical mass in High Park’s 161 hectares of space, stopping to smell the flowers in numbers that can rival Yonge-Dundas Square. The day seems anything but pastoral or bucolic.

Traffic—cars, bikes, longboards, scooters—snarl the park’s entrances, with the intersection at High Park and Bloor nearly blocked by the density of arriving vehicles alone. Along West Road, the lawns and shaded groves near the Forest School fill quickly, as crowds of camera-wielding residents turn what was all but abandoned only two weeks ago into a festival scene. Even at the sweltering height of summer, High Park isn’t as overwhelmingly, blissfully popular as it is for this brief, fleeting sliver of spring.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, and it’s like a dream. As West Road plunges down the first in a series of hills into High Park, it veers toward a sharp, right-hand pedestrian turn—which then plunges even more steeply toward Grenadier Pond. This time of year, the path is bursting with cherry blossoms—and not just any cherry blossoms (or, in Japanese, sakura). These are examples of the most resplendent species of cherry blossom in the world.

In 1959, the citizens of Tokyo presented the citizens of Toronto with our city’s first Yoshino Cherry tree—what’s known in Japanese as somei yoshino. In Japan, these deciduous trees—relatively small in stature, growing to between five and 12 metres in height—are naturally occurring hybrids, believed to be descended from the Oshima cherry trees of Japan’s Izu Peninsula, near Tokyo. Because of their adaptability to a range of temperate environments, the trees have become globally renowned, and are perhaps one of the most widely cultivated types of sakura in the world.