It is now the end of April and most of the late-blooming ornamental cherry trees have finished their display for the year. Even so, let us watch them bow.

The City of Vancouver has planted 9,900 trees with the cultivar name of ‘Kanzan’, Prunus Sato-zakura Group ‘Kanzan’; it is also called ‘Kwanzan’. This is the greatest number of all ornamental cherry trees planted here. There is bound to be one near you, if you live in Vancouver. And it is the oldest cultivar discussed here, being cultivated before 1681. These trees wait until the end of the season before their deep pink double blossoms burst into large inflorescences that last for several weeks. This particular tree is growing south of Lagoon Drive, above some of the Stanley Park tennis courts.

‘Gyoiko’ is a rare cultivar. Also in the Prunus Sato-zakura Group, it is a village cherry that was originally cultivated in Japan before 1780. Because the outer petals are mostly a light green and the inner petals are striped with green and pink, its name of ‘Gyoiko’ refers to the robes worn by the women of ancient imperial Japan. Now at the end of the season, each semi-double blossom offers white petals striped with pink and green, though from afar, the deep pink at the centre of each blossom seems to bleed into a wider space.

‘Shujaku’ is another rare cultivar. Both ‘Gyoiko’ and ‘Shujaku’ are part of the collaboration between British Columbia Institute of Technology and the University of British Columbia in which these old cultivars are propagated using tissue culture. When the book Ornamental Cherries in Vancouver was published in 2014 by Douglas Justice, UBC Botanical Garden, and the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, only two trees existed in Vancouver. The one in the photograph grows near the stone bridge between Ceperley Meadow, the Ted and Mary Grieg Rhododendron Garden path, Lost Lagoon, and Lagoon Drive.  Now more are being grown on their own roots, as a result of the collaboration between UBC and BCIT.

All over the city, Prunus avium, bird cherry, is a late-season cherry tree; it is not a cultivar. Sometimes, it is planted, but if it is growing in an unusual place, such a tree is more likely the result of a bird dropping the seed in its own package of fertilizer randomly. This is the cherry tree often used as the rootstock for a grafted cherry cultivar either for its flowers or its fruit. The difference between these single white flowers and the flowers of an ornamental cherry cultivar is in the sepals, which recurve against their pedicels, rather than creating a star shape against the back of the five petals as the cultivars do.

Information from Ornamental Cherries in Vancouver, Douglas Justice, UBC Botanical Garden, and the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival; Public trees in https://opendata.vancouver.ca/explore/dataset/public-trees.