Skip the Cherry Blossoms and Come for the Plums

The Flower Japan Loved First Ume, the Japanese plum, was the flower of choice in Japan for centuries before cherry blossom took the title. When the eighth-century Man'yōshū poetry collection refers simply to "the blossom", it usually means plum, and plum appears in it far more often than cherry does. The taste shifted during the Heian period, and by the time hanami became a national habit the cherry had won.

That history is still legible in where you find ume. Plum groves cluster at shrines, at old gardens and at temples rather than along riversides and in public parks, because they were planted when plum was the cultivated, literary flower rather than the popular one.

A Flower That Means Endurance, Not Fragility The two blossoms carry almost opposite meanings, and the difference is timing. Cherry blooms in mild weather and drops within days, which is why it became the standing image of transience. Plum blooms in the cold — often against bare branches, sometimes against snow, before winter has finished — and it became the image of perseverance, the thing that arrives before conditions are ready for it.

You can smell the difference too, which nobody mentions. Cherry blossom is close to scentless. Plum is strongly, sweetly fragrant, and on a still cold morning a grove announces itself before you see it.

How to Tell Them Apart This is easier than it looks and makes the whole season more legible. Plum flowers sit tight against the branch on almost no stalk, appear singly or in pairs, and have rounded petals; the tree is dark, gnarled and often twisted. Cherry flowers hang on visible stalks in clusters, have a notch at the tip of each petal, and the bark is smooth with distinctive horizontal markings. Peach, which blooms in between and confuses everyone, sits somewhere between the two with pointed petals.

A Longer, More Forgiving Season The planning advantage is decisive. Cherry blossom gives a location a usable window of about a week and punishes anyone whose flights were booked three months earlier. Plum unfolds gradually over several weeks and varies substantially by region and by cultivar, so a well-known plum garden usually has something in flower across a long stretch of late winter into early spring.

The well-known groves — Kairaku-en in Mito, the grounds at Dazaifu Tenmangū in Fukuoka, Atami's coastal gardens — all run plum festivals, and all of them draw a fraction of what a cherry site draws in April. Which means you can decide to go a week beforehand, which is not a sentence anyone writes about sakura.

Plum and the God of Learning The Dazaifu connection is worth understanding because it explains why plum turns up at so many shrines. Sugawara no Michizane, the ninth-century scholar-official later deified as Tenjin, the god of learning, was strongly associated with plum trees, and shrines dedicated to him across the country are planted with them accordingly. In February those grounds fill with students buying academic charms ahead of entrance exams — so the plum season and the exam season overlap, and the atmosphere at a Tenjin shrine in late winter is not simply floral.