Hood River cherry orchards bloom
— — the week the orchard floor turned white.
Not only on a wall.
“Late March into April, the cherry blocks above Hood River shift from brown lattice to a soft white quilt. Growers here run sweet cherries — Bing, Rainier, Lapins, Skeena — in the same volcanic soils that feed the pears and apples below. The bloom holds for about ten days, then the petals go down in the next wind off the river.
Hood River cherry orchards bloom, 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.
Hood River Valley is a glacial trough running south from the Columbia River toward the north flank of Mount Hood, which rises to 11,249 feet. The valley floor sits near 500 feet at the river and climbs past 1,500 feet at the upper orchards. Hood River County holds roughly 14,000 acres of tree fruit on Cascade alluvium and weathered basalt. The Mount Hood Railroad, built in 1906, still runs the 22 miles from the town of Hood River to Parkdale through the bloom each spring.
Sweet cherries open after the pears and just before the apples, usually the first week of April when soil temperatures cross about 50°F. The window runs ten to fourteen days. Growers plant Bing, Lapins, Rainier, and Skeena, with bloom staggered by elevation across blocks from Odell up to Parkdale. A late frost or a wet stretch during pollination can cut a crop in half, which is why orchards run wind machines and, in hard cold snaps, helicopters through the last week of March.
The Columbia River Gorge sits a few miles north, and the valley breathes its weather. Cool marine air pushes east through the gorge most afternoons; in spring it carries the smell of wet basalt and orchard cover crop. Mount Hood holds the south horizon, snowbound into June. Wind off the river is steady enough that Hood River became the windsurfing capital of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s, with the same valley funneling both bloom-time breezes and summer westerlies into one corridor.