The dam came first, and the trees were planted around the edge of what it made. The reservoir behind the Shichikawa dam has a shoreline of about five kilometres, and Wakayama's tourism authority counts some three thousand cherry trees following it. Kozagawa is at the southern end of the prefecture, a long way from the city and from anything else.

A reservoir is simply a valley that has been filled with water.

When the water rose here, the roads and the fields on the valley floor went under, and a new shoreline appeared at a height that had until then been ordinary hillside.

The cherry trees are planted along that new line, at the level the engineers decided on. Which means the five kilometres of blossom sit above a landscape that is still down there: below the reflection in the water, and below the water itself, at a depth nobody thinks about. It is a made shore with planted trees on it. Nothing about the arrangement is accidental, which is unusual among the places on this list, most of which grew into what they are over centuries rather than being decided on. The timing given on this page is not official; it comes from the weather record for Wakayama city.