East Vancouver offers the best last-chance views for cherry blossom season

Stroll through any given Vancouver street this week, and there is a good chance the sidewalks will be carpeted with the bright, pastel pinks of fallen cherry blossom petals. 

Though the peak of cherry blossom season is largely behind us and the city’s official festival wrapped up on April 17, it’s still not too late to take in the last bursts of colour in select neighbourhoods.

“It’s likely we only have [a few days] left of cherry blossom season,” Andrea Arnot, executive director of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, wrote in a statement to Vancity Lookout. 

Vancouver hosts over 44,000 trees city-wide and 54 different cultivars, or varieties, of cherry blossoms, each blooming for about two weeks on average. 

Kanzan cherry blossoms, the bright pink, late-blooming cultivar, are among the most populous in the city and tend to bloom later into April, while the more elusive Shiro-fugen blooms the latest, sometimes lasting until June. 

“The Kanzan cultivar does bloom a little later, especially the further away from sea level one goes,” wrote Arnot. For Vancouver, areas around Killarney, Renfrew-Collingwood, and Victoria-Fraserview are likely to have the best remaining blossoms.  

Not sure where to look to catch the last of the season? 

Whether you already photographed them at their peak or are a bit of a “late bloomer,” data scientist and University of British Columbia professor, Daniel Chen, has created several helpful maps to help Vancouverites make the most of these unique trees. 

Using open data from the city, Chen mapped the city’s most cherry blossom-dense neighbourhoods and streets, identified the types of trees in each neighbourhood, and even created optimal running and biking routes to view the blooms.  

“[The maps] really started because my mom had never been to Vancouver during this time,” Chen, a native New Yorker, said he wanted to maximize the opportunity to see the best cherry blossoms possible during her springtime visit. 

When he got to mapping, he said he was surprised to find that, despite the popularity of areas like David Lam Park for cherry blossom viewing, downtown actually has the lowest density of cherry trees in the city. 

While Mount Pleasant boasts the highest density of cherry blossom trees overall, oddly, he said, it does not have a single one of the city’s 30 highest-density streets. Many of those streets are located in various parts of East Vancouver. 

Chen’s map of the top 30 highest cherry blossom-dense streets in the city, shows many of them stretching through Renfrew-Collingwood, particularly along Rupert Street, and through Victoria-Fraserview and Sunset along East 49th, East 61st and Victoria. 

Chen used open data provided by the city of Vancouver to create the various maps. “It’s pretty cool that all of this [data] is coming from public resources that the Vancouver City government maintains,” said Chen, “and you can see that the city government is definitely planning this… they aren’t just random trees across the city.” 

Next year, he hopes to expand his dataset further to include the timing of the bloom cycles for the different cherry blossom cultivars across the city. 

When asked why he thinks the cherry blossoms are so beloved, Chen said. “[Cherry blossom season] is a signal to Vancouverites that it might finally stop raining… people can go out for picnics again,” adding “with all of the pinks and reds… there’s a uniqueness there that’s just really pleasant to look at.”

For those looking for the best views for the very last of the season, Arnot suggested the double row of Kanzan trees of East 28th and Penticton, and the arch of trees over Templeton from East 1st to East 4th. 

Vancity Lookout also confirmed that, while not an exhaustive list, pops of colour could still be found in the residential areas around Nootka Street between East 22nd and East 24th, along Nanaimo Street bordering the west side of Nanaimo Park, and along Rupert Street between East 17th and East 30th.