Nature Profile
Trees
Prunus ‘Okame’ (okame cherry)
Prunus ‘Okame’
The okame cherry is a small, deciduous tree featuring mildly fragrant, rosy-pink flowers in early spring. The flowers completely cover bare branches, appearing earlier than most cherries. A hybrid of Prunus campanulata and Prunus incisa, okame cherry requires full sun to partial shade, and grows well in almost any soil, including in heavy clay as long as there is good drainage. The okame cherry was a gift from Japan to our capital in the early 1900s and is the one currently featured in Washington DC’s “Cherry Blossom Festival” each spring.
[Photo: Prunus Okame; Credit: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]
