Shizumine Furusato Park

Almost every cherry blossom site in Japan is somei-yoshino, the pale single-flowered clone that blooms and drops within a week in early April. Shizumine is not. Its two thousand trees are yae-zakura — double-flowered varieties with dense pom-pom blossoms in deeper pink — and they come out roughly two weeks later, when the somei-yoshino everywhere else is finished and the crowds have gone home.

The park is twelve hectares of low wooded hill in Naka, laid out with paths through the trees, and it is on the national list of a hundred best cherry blossom sites. Entry is free year-round and even during the festival only parking is charged. For anyone whose trip to Japan lands a fortnight too late for the famous blossom, this is the answer, and it is almost entirely unknown outside the prefecture.