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A cherry blossom on the banks of the Meguro River in Tokyo on Thursday. Flowers are an unusual event at this time of the year.
Kwiyeon Ha / Reuters
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Kwiyeon Ha / Reuters
A cherry blossom on the banks of the Meguro River in Tokyo on Thursday. Flowers are an unusual event at this time of the year.
Kwiyeon Ha / Reuters
In Japan, the spring bloom of cherry blossoms is an annual celebration rite, accompanied by picnics and flowering canopy feasts.
But this week, a strange thing happened: some of the trees blossomed again. In autumn.
The Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that a meteorological company had received hundreds of reports on blooming trees in an area extending from Kyushu, in southwestern Japan, to Hokkaido in the north.
The apparent cause? The two typhoons that hit the country in September and early October.
"This year's storms have affected vast areas and strong winds may have caused the bloom," forest surgeon Hiroyuki Wada told the broadcaster. "I've never seen anything like it."
Wada explained that a popular variety of cherry blossoms, Yoshino cherry, produced buds in the summer but usually did not bloom because a hormone released from the leaves released by the tree prevented the development of buds.
But this year, many leaves were torn off by these powerful typhoons, resulting in high winds and exposure to salt that caused the dieback. Warm temperatures followed, which encouraged the buds to bloom.
Fortunately, off-season flowering should not affect spring blooms.
The spring bloom of cherry blossoms in Kyoto has been documented for over 1,000 years. The Washington Post reported last year. Examining the diaries and chronicles of emperors, aristocrats and monks, Osaka Prefecture University Professor Yasuyuki Aono collected a set of dates of cherry blossom dates, dating back to Year 801.
For most of this period, the dates of full bloom were quite consistent. But since 1850, the date of flowering has grown earlier and earlier. This same trend has been documented by the National Park Service since 1921 in Washington, DC, home to 3,000 cherry blossoms donated by Japan.
"In Kyoto and Washington, warming trends and early proliferation are likely due to an increasing effect of urban heat islands and the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere", explained the meteorologist Jason Samenow in the newspaper. To post.
