[URBAN NOTE] How one man’s obsession could help solve the mystery of Toronto’s missing sakura

[rfmcdonald]

The National Post's Joe O'Connor and Graham Runciman report, with video, on a fan of High Park's cherry blossoms who wants to find out what happened this year.

Steve (Sakura Steve) Joniak moves with weary-purpose, camera at the ready.

Treading slowly, pausing, peering up through a large zoom lens, while hoping that he might zero in on a telling bit of evidence that could unlock a baffling springtime mystery that has taken root in High Park. The park is a Toronto icon, an idyllic, 161-acre hub for community sports teams, skating and pool parties, picnicking families, joggers, dog walkers, fishermen and those who simply want to spread a blanket beneath a shady tree and while away the afternoon.

It is the trees that Sakura Steve is most interested in. Chiefly: the sakura (cherry) blossom trees. For many Torontonians — and for many others from parts nearby and from places as far away as Japan — the sakura blossoms are the Beatles of the park’s ecosystem. Each spring they bloom, transforming a slope at the southern end of the park into a sea of pink and white. This fleeting, flowery paradise lasts but for a handful of days, attracting blossom lovers and the curious by the tens of thousands to wander in their midst.

The sakuras were a gift from a Japan, an arboreal thank you note to the citizens of Toronto for welcoming thousands of Japanese refugees after the Second World War. They are a treasure and, alas, in 2016, they are not blooming — (neither are the crowds) — and Sakura Steve is determined to find out why.

“It is disheartening,” he says, of the blossoms mysterious absence. “The blossoms, they sort of become a part of you.”