Descanso Gardens

It's Cherry Blossom Time in La Cañada Flintridge

The fruit trees of Descanso Gardens are peaking as the first week of spring unfolds.

Descanso Gardens

What to Know

  • The fruit trees are peaking as March nears its conclusion around the Japanese Garden at Descanso Gardens
  • Included with garden admission
  • Thousands of tulips around the Promenade are also popping, and lilacs are in luscious bloom, too

Locating a lovely watercolor or elegant oil painting to admire somewhere in Southern California?

Lucky lovers of timeless masterworks know that they only need to call upon one of our region's acclaimed art institutions, should they want to bask in a sublime scene involving swirls of color, pops of pigment, and the sort of uplifting imagery that can make a person's spirit feel positively aloft.

But sometimes? Paintings aren't framed, nor are they placed on walls, and stepping inside of a building? That is a common route to beholding a fabulous piece, but it isn't the only way to go.

For one of Southern California's best-known paintings from nature, as in a scene that comes together outside, under the sun, when flowers, shrubs, water, and light work in splendid symmetry, majestically materializes at Descanso Gardens each spring.

And the ethereal "living painting" is happening now, as the first week of spring warms up, inside the destination's acclaimed Japanese Garden.

The main subject of this all-too-brief, enjoy-it-now visual? The garden's famous 'Akebono' and 'Beni' Hoshi' cherry trees, which appear like soft pink clouds above the water, and bright bridge, and flowering bushes below.

This see-it-soon scene needs no additional ticket; savoring this vivid vista is included with admission.

But there are other wondrous opportunities included with your admission, such as the chance to stroll by the thousands of tulips now blooming around the garden's Promenade.

You can also visit the lovely lilacs currently adding a sweet scent to the air.

The truth of it? You might poetically and accurately claim that all paintings are alive in a sense, and full of motion, character, and depth, whether the painting is placed on a traditional canvas, or the side of a building, or created by beautiful blossoms in a garden.

But to see this last, oh-so-ephemeral masterpiece, before the flowers flutter away and the painting transforms into its next created-by-nature phase, make for this wonderland of cherry blossom beauty before spring has sprung further.

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