The cherry trees here start in February. Shinjuku Gyoen holds about nine hundred of them, of some seventy varieties, according to the Ministry of the Environment, which runs the garden. Seventy varieties do not agree on when to open, and the practical result is that something is in flower here for roughly two and a half months.

Kanzakura and its relatives come first, from February into the first days of March, when almost nobody has hanami in mind and the lawns are empty. Somei-yoshino follows, flowering from late March into early April. The double-flowered kinds peak around the middle of April.

So the answer to when the cherry blossom is here depends entirely on which cherry you mean, and the garden does not pick one for you.

Someone who comes in February, someone who comes at the end of March, and someone who comes in the middle of April all see cherry trees in flower at Shinjuku Gyoen, and none of them see the same thing. There is also a variety called jugatsu-zakura, the October cherry, which flowers twice a year: once in October and again in March. Counting it, the garden may spend less of the year without cherry blossom than with it.