Thursday, April 25, 2019

Unending mysteries of cherry trees



Unending mysteries of cherry trees. I almost passed this one by, but then I realized it was in flower. To a certain extent. It's a healthy young tree on a trading estate in Swindon. It looks a bit like Kanzan, if you can imagine Kanzan with hardly any blossom. But Kanzan buds appear before (or alongside) the dark red new leaves, and the emerging petals are deep rose. On this tree the little red buds appear when the leaves are already green, and the emerging petals are the same light pink as the mature blossom.





Just as a reminder, here's what Kanzan usually looks like (this one was a bit further down the street).



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An hour earlier, I came across another mystery while strolling through the abandoned Moredon Tree Collection. It isn't one of the tree catalogued on the sign -- but if you're looking for it it's not far from the Tibetan Cherry. (The white blossom you can see on the left in the picture below is a collapsed Bird Cherry).


The blossoms were a bit past it, except for a few that were growing straight out of the bole (which has rocketed skywards).




The only single pink cherry blossom that I'm familiar with is Sargent Cherry, but 25th April seems a bit late for that -- I saw others coming into flower on 20th March, and the blossom usually lasts just a couple of weeks.

On the lateral branches the blossoms all hang down: it must have looked lovely a week ago.




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A couple of years later, I went past the same tree when it was just beginning to flower: on 25 March 2021, more or less in sync with Sargent Cherry. But it doesn't look like the Sargent Cherries I'm familiar with, because these flowers emerge from green scales and pedicels rather than deep red ones. As you can see below, the buds and opening flowers are pink but turn almost white by the time they are fully open. (As we know, they'll end up going pink again before they fall.)







Below is a (not very good) picture to try and give an impression of the height of this spindly tree. 





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