Sakura zensen

Not wishing to miss the blooming of High Park’s famous cherry blossoms this year, I figured I’d keep an eye on what’s happening by using everyone else’s constant stream of photos uploaded to Flickr. Rather than hitting refresh on a Flickr search every day, I built a little tool that displays the very latest cherry blossom photos in High Park, and that allows those results to be syndicated by RSS (which I don’t think standard Flickr searches allow). It’s simple, and really ramshackle, but it should work.

It’s also pretty iPhone/mobile friendly. Navigate to it here.

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5 responses

  1. Posted April 10, 2010 at 1:32 pm | Permalink

    Check out http://www.highparknaturecentre.com/2010/04/cherry-blossom-update-2/. The HIgh Park Nature CEntre is taking daily photos of the trees and posting to our website!

  2. Posted April 11, 2010 at 7:40 am | Permalink

    That’s awesome. :D This all started because I wished I still lived close enough to actually take a photo a day of them.

  3. Posted April 12, 2010 at 2:07 pm | Permalink

    My prediction for the height of the Sakura hanami is this Sunday, April 18th, 2010.

    I’m basing this rough guess on what I’m seeing of last year’s bloom on Flickr. Compare:

    April 24, 2009: http://flic.kr/p/6hNwXd
    * with *
    April 10, 2010: http://flic.kr/p/7Sr82q

    Basically identical. Evidently we’re about two weeks ahead of schedule this year, which makes sense given our uncommonly warm spring.

    Last year, those tiny buds transformed into a massive blossom party of tens of thousands of people within one week. Have a peek at

    May 3, 2009: http://flic.kr/p/6mbB5v

    That’s nine days of average spring temperatures and the occasional rainshower. Though we’ve had a fairly chilly past few days, I’d argue we’re on a similar track, and High Park will be completely transformed into a white and pink wonderland by this coming weekend. I also get the feeling the very pinnacle of the show will be more mid-week, so perhaps the weekend of April 24/25 will be a party as well. I guess we’ll see.

  4. Posted April 16, 2010 at 12:34 pm | Permalink

    Awesome predictions! I’ll be sharing this with the dozens of people calling and e-mailing to ask!

  5. Posted April 20, 2010 at 1:09 pm | Permalink

    Well, I don’t know if Sunday was the very height of the blooming, but it was very lovely indeed and drew pretty significant crowds. I’m still developing and sifting through images from our walk through the park.

One Trackback

  1. By Sakura Bloom Forecast 2011 on April 12, 2011 at 1:32 pm

    [...] details can be found in last year’s post on the subject. When results start appearing, I’ll provide a prediction for the height of [...]

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