(John Sonderman)

It’s been a strange spring for the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin, but slow-and-steady progress has finally led to results this week. The trees are just two stages away from peak bloom, though with upcoming cold weather we still expect it will take up to 10 days for the blossoms to reach their full potential.

The cherry trees reached the first bloom stage more than a month ago, on Feb. 25. At that point, temperatures had been abnormally warm for a couple of weeks, which prompted the trees to sprout buds.

It’s been slow-going since then. It took three weeks for the trees to reach the next stage in which the florets were visible. It took until March 22 for the “indicator tree” to reach peak bloom. Historically this tree, which is located along the Tidal Basin to the east of the Jefferson Memorial, has bloomed about one week before the rest of the Yoshino cherry trees.

This year, not even the indicator tree is helpful in predicting when the trees will reach peak bloom. It has been seven days, and the trees around the Tidal Basin have reached only the “peduncle elongation” stage as of March 29, according to the National Park Service.

This is the longest it has taken the cherry blossoms to emerge after starting to bud since at least 1992, when the National Park Service began tracking the dates.

There’s only one more stage to get through before peak bloom: puffy white. At that point, the flowers will be visible but won’t be fully out. In a normal year, peak bloom arrives four to six days after puffy white.

This year is not normal, though, which has made it basically impossible to make a decent peak-bloom prediction. Our original forecast was for March 25. Then we moved it to April 1. Now it looks as if the trees won’t reach peak bloom until on or around April 10.

In the next week and a half, temperatures will fluctuate between highs close to 60 degrees and overnight lows that get close to the freezing point. Temperatures below 30 degrees could damage the cherry blossoms now that they’ve reached the peduncle elongation stage, although we think the risk is very low.

If you’re trying to make plans to see the cherry blossoms this year, we suggest April 7 to 8 or April 14 to 15. It’s possible that peak bloom will happen in the week between, but the trees should look good on either of these weekends.

Thanks to everyone who shared their cherry blossom photos with us!


(John Sonderman)

(Carol Jean Stalun)

(George Jiang)