Flowering Cherries and Blossom Trees

Flowering cherries and their close relatives, the flowering plums, peaches and hawthorns, are deciduous trees grown for a heavy burst of blossom at the end of winter and through early spring, mostly before the leaves arrive. The rest of the year they work as small to medium shade trees, several carrying purple or bronze summer foliage and autumn colour. Buy one if you want a single feature tree for a front lawn, a driveway entry or a courtyard, and you garden where winters are genuinely cold, where flowering is heaviest. In warm coastal and subtropical gardens the display is thinner and less predictable, so the purple leaf plums are the safer pick there.

Kanzan is the tree most people picture: double deep pink flowers on a vase-shaped frame that widens with age. Mount Fuji flowers white and semi-double on a low, wide, horizontally branched habit, so allow room for the spread. Amanogawa is the opposite shape, narrow and upright, the one for a path edge or a tight bed. Ukon is the oddity, cream to greenish in flower, bare root only. Among the weepers, Cheals Double Pink arches over in pink, and Shirotae is that same Mount Fuji worked as a weeper, while Snow Fountain and Prunus subhirtella pendula Alba cascade almost to the ground. The plums are grown as much for foliage as flower: Prunus cerasifera Nigra holds deep purple leaves all summer after single pale pink flowers, Oakville Crimson Spire gives that colouring in a narrow column, and Prunus x blireana carries double pink flowers over bronze-purple growth. Alboplena is a double white flowering peach, and Pauls Scarlet is a red flowering hawthorn that copes with exposed, windy sites better than the cherries do.

Bare root stock, lifted and sold through winter, is the more affordable start, and potted grades run from 180mm and 200mm through 300mm, 330mm and 400mm into 45L, 75L and 100L. The advanced end reaches 150L, 200L and 400L, including standards of Mount Fuji, Cheals Double Pink and the white weeping cherry, already on a clear trunk.

Plant in full sun, in soil that drains. That last point is where most of these trees are lost. Prunus will not tolerate wet feet: in heavy clay, or a lawn bed watered daily, the roots and crown rot out over one wet winter and the tree either collapses in the first hot spell or never shoots in spring. On soil that holds water, plant on a raised mound rather than in a deep hole that fills like a bucket. Keep the graft union above the soil line, mulch out to the drip line but hold it back from the trunk, and water deeply but occasionally. Prune lightly and in dry weather after flowering, because cuts made in cold wet conditions are how silver leaf and canker get in.

If you are still comparing, crabapples give spring blossom plus autumn fruit on a similar frame, and ornamental and fruiting pears offer white blossom on a tougher, more upright tree. Browse feature trees for other single-specimen ideas, or advanced trees for immediate effect. Every order ships farm-direct with flat $99 delivery across QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, ACT and WA, a $399 minimum order, and the 30-Day Healthy Plant Guarantee.