San Francisco Citizen

First started noticing these blooms a couple of days ago:

Click to expand

Some people think they are cherry blossoms. Check it:

Well it’s late January in San Francisco so it’s time for our sidewalk plum trees to begin blossoming. Yeah, they look a lot like cherry trees and that causes people around town to start talking about how global warming / climate change is making the cherry trees of April wake up three months early or something.

You can double-check with the Friends of the Urban Forest if you want, but I’ll tell you, those flashes of pink you see brightening up the otherwise-dreary Streets of San Francsico these days are early-rising Prunus blireiana, aka Flowering Plum trees, or something similar.

Be patient and you’ll be rewarded with real cherry trees in March – check out the sked at the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park.

If this January blossom is cherry, I’ll eat my hat:

This will be the scene in the Financh in a couple of months – our wild parrots love all kinds of prunus blossoms of course.

Take heart, Spring is just around the corner…

Tags: 2010, 2011, april, balmy, bay area, bloom, blossom, california, cherry, climate change, day, February, Festival, global warming, golden gate park, ground, groundhog, hanami, hog, january, Japanese, japantown, march, plum, post, sakura, San Francisco, spring, street, tree, warm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2011 at 9:13 am and is filed under flora. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.