The places where the cherry trees grow all have names. The Expo '70 park lists nine of them: Higashi-oji, the Japanese garden, Sakura no Nagare, Seseragi Hiroba, Higashi no Hiroba, Haru no Izumi, Hana no Oka, Manyo no Sato. Reading the list is enough to give you a sense of how large the grounds are.

The varieties are not one thing either, which is the other half of it.

Somei-yoshino, sato-zakura, weeping cherry, Jindai-akebono, yoko-zakura, higan-zakura, kanhi-zakura. That is what the park itself names on its flowering page, and there may well be more that it does not.

Nine named locations and at least seven varieties means the flowering here does not happen at one moment, or in one place, or in any order you could put on a map. The early kinds open somewhere in the park while the late ones are still shut somewhere else, and no single walk on any single day takes in all of it. This is a park built on the site of a world's fair, which is to say it was laid out from the start to be too big to see in a day. The planting has kept that habit, and nobody has tried to concentrate it since. The timing given on this page is not the park's; it comes from the weather record for Osaka.