Brooklyn Botanic Garden cherry esplanade
— — the week the avenue turns pink.
Not only on a wall.
“The double row of Kanzan cherries that runs the length of the central lawn at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. About forty trees, planted in the 1920s, that bloom together for roughly one week in late April. The Sakura Matsuri festival keeps the same weekend most years, and by mid-May the petals are already on the grass.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden cherry esplanade, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened in 1910 on fifty-two acres of reclaimed land between Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum. The Cherry Esplanade sits at the garden's centre, two parallel rows of Kanzan cherries flanking a broad central lawn, planted in the 1920s. Across the larger garden the staff maintains more than two hundred trees of twenty-six cherry varieties, one of the largest collections outside Japan. The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, designed by Takeo Shiota and opened in 1915, sits a short walk to the south of the esplanade.
The Kanzan bloom on the esplanade peaks in the last week of April most years, though warm springs have pushed first bloom into early April and cold ones have held it until the first week of May. The garden's live CherryWatch tracker logs the stage of every variety. The full bloom holds for roughly seven days. After that, the petals fall in a slow pink drift across the central lawn, and the canopy turns green for the rest of the year until the cycle returns.
The garden sits at 990 Washington Avenue in Crown Heights, a short walk from the Eastern Parkway subway and the Brooklyn Museum. Adult admission runs about twenty-two dollars; Friday mornings before noon are free outside the cherry-blossom weeks. The Sakura Matsuri festival, held the last weekend of April, draws roughly seventy thousand visitors across two days and sells out in advance. Members enter through the gate on Washington Avenue and the school groups use the entrance on Flatbush, which spreads the foot traffic across the property.