Cherry Trees Grace The Dallas Arboretum
The “World of Flowers” during our annual Dallas Blooms festival promises the ephemeral beauty of Cherry trees on top of the tulips and daffodils everyone has grown to expect. With our Prunus x yedoensis, also known as Yoshino Cherry, proves that you don’t have to go to Washington D.C. to find flowering cherry trees in the United States. It has become incredibly common for their fans to barrage us with questions about these beautiful Yoshinos, because the window to catch them at peak bloom is often quite small, around a week.
Flowering cherry trees thrive throughout the mid-south, and with the right soil type and acidity, can do well in Texas. The Arboretum’s deep, black gumbo soil has allowed us to grow beautiful cherry trees.
I brought the idea to have a large flowering cherry tree display to the Arboretum when I first joined the team as the new V. P. of Gardens, nearly 20 years ago. I noticed that the Dallas Arboretum already had two healthy, flowering cherry trees, despite the fact that the alkaline clays common throughout the Metroplex are not friendly to these trees, I knew we had the opportunity for something special. So I cautiously hatched a plan to plant ten flowering cherry trees a year for ten years. Ten at first, so if the plan failed it wouldn’t be a great loss and ten years because a hundred trees sounded like enough to have a real show.
If you time your visit right or have gotten lucky in years past, you know the result. The Arboretum currently has over 100 of the white-blossom-covered trees lining the Paseo de Flores, the central walkway at the garden. And to catch the magic of these trees in full bloom, you have to act fast. You only have ten days from when the first bud opens on a tree until the last petal blows away.
The trees usually bloom mid to late March depending on the weather.
In addition to the flowering cherry trees Prunus x yedoensis, we have other species of flowering cherry trees and quite a few flowering peach trees that all bloom during the Spring. Dallas Blooms, presented by IBERIABANK in 2018, also features more than 500,000 spring-blooming bulbs, including tulips, daffodils, Dutch Iris and
We hope you keep your eyes on our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) for updates, and make plans to join us during this unique, exciting time at the Dallas Arboretum.
Thanks
-Dave Forehand
VP Of Gardens
