Nat Henry | Writing

Blossoming trees line a Seattle street. Credit: user shelmac on Flickr, license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Where to find cherry and plum blossoms across Seattle

March 2025 update: I’ve refreshed all the data sources for Seattle Prunus trees and updated the tree counts accordingly. The revised map benefits from SDOT’s street tree inventory, which has expanded substantially since this article was first published in March 2023. I’ve also added an optional user location marker to the interactive map.

As spring approaches, the anticipation for cherry blossoms in Seattle is reaching a fever pitch. The Yoshino cherry trees on the University of Washington Quad are in partial bloom, and you can follow their progress on their official website, webcam, or Bluesky account. Perennial guides to cherry blossoms around the city will include many familiar names: the world-famous spring blooms at Washington Park Arboretum, UW Campus, Lake Washington Boulevard near Seward Park, and Kobe Terrace rightfully appear at the top of most lists.

In addition to these chart-topping destinations, I wanted to know if there were overlooked gems for blossom watching around Seattle. The answer was surprisingly hard to find, since there isn’t a central database for flowering cherry trees in Seattle. With an enormous amount of help from tree data stewards around Seattle, I combined information from five different databases to get a more comprehensive view of trees around the city:

I filtered these sources to trees from the Prunus genus, which includes cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, and almonds. Of these, I tagged seven species and their cultivars as “flowering cherries.” Other trees in the genus have blooms worth seeking out—notably, “Thundercloud” Purple-leaf Plum trees are in spectacular bloom at the time of writing. Some trees in the dataset were labeled as Prunus sp., which could be any species in the genus, but are most likely cherry or plum trees.

The combined dataset includes over 44,000 Prunus trees across Seattle, including over 17,000 flowering cherry trees. You can explore locations and information about each tree on the map below. At the top of the map, you can choose to view just flowering cherry species or all trees in the genus. The zoomed-out map highlights streets and parks that have dense clusters of trees: click on a street or park (tap on mobile) to focus in on that area, or zoom in to see trees in a particular neighborhood. Make sure to zoom in on your neighborhood even if it isn’t highlighted—there are probably still blossoms nearby!

    

Some of the varieties of flowering cherries that can be found around Seattle include:

Trees on privately-held land outside of public rights of way aren’t included in this data, so even if you don’t see many flowering cherries near you on the map, you might be delighted by a trip around your neighborhood.

Acknowledgments

I would like to sincerely thank the tree experts and GIS professionals who made this map possible:

Have questions or comments? Let me know!