Bloom and bust in High Park
Experts blame this spring’s sporadic weather for the stunted cherry blossom spectacle
Every spring, hundreds of tourists and Instagramready residents flock to High Park for “peak bloom” or in Japanese, “sakura hanami,” which roughly translates to “cherry blossom flower viewing.”
It’s an annual ritual, but it’s looking like 2016 may be remembered as the year of no blossoms.
The Star visited the west-end park Wednesday afternoon to investigate and found puny green buds where there should have been a canopy of pale pink. Even city staff admits it’s not looking good.
“We now predict that there will not be a ‘peak bloom’ this spring,” staff at High Park Nature Centre tweeted from their official account May 6.
“There will likely be a few blossoms later in May, but we certainly will not have the stunning display we are used to in late April or early May,” staff posted on their website. As a consolation prize, staff said the later-blooming akebono and fugenzo trees will produce some flowers later in the season.
Steven Joniak, who vigilantly tracks the status of the blossoms through his blog, Sakura in High Park, called it on May 4 — “no bloom will be seen in 2016” — and blames erratic weather this spring. “2016 proved to be such an up and down year that we simply didn’t have enough consecutive warm days to help the trees along,” he wrote.
He estimates “about 60 to 70 per cent of the delicate buds have gone straight to leaf,” skipping the flower stage all together, while “an extremely small percentage” have bloomed and the rest “seem completely stagnant with no signs of any changes or growth.”
Japan’s ambassador to Canada donated the first 2,000 cherry trees on behalf of the citizens of Tokyo in 1959, in recognition of Toronto opening its doors to Japanese people after the Second World War.