Brooklyn Life

The 3 Best Places to See Brooklyn's Trees in Bloom

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Cherry Blossom Festival is a perennial favorite, but the other two borough parks on this list are far lesser known.

by Hannah Frishberg

04/05/2016 0

Spring is almost in the air (or should be, at least) and no one’s more aware of it than the flowers.

With plants beginning to bloom across the borough, some spots are better than others for taking in the greenery. Below, three of the best locations to spot clusters of flowering trees.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden
A hub of plant life year round, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is especially jubilant in the spring, during its monthlong Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival. The 2016 event will be held from Saturday, April 30 to Sunday, May 1. Tickets cost $20, and the opening weekend alone offers 60 events and performances celebrating both traditional and contemporary Japanese culture. To find out the status of the garden’s multitude of cherry blossoms, check the online Cherrywatch to see which have bloomed.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is located at 455 Flatbush Avenue.

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Owl’s Head Park
This large Bay Ridge green space is known for its dog run and Brooklyn’s only city-owned skate park. Lesser noticed are its Okame cherry trees, a hybrid of Formosan and Fuji cherries that produces a light pink flower with darker reddish-brown stalks.

Owl’s Head Park is located at 68th Street and Colonial Avenue in Bay Ridge.

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Sunset Park
Like the eponymous neighborhood in which it’s located, Sunset Park offers sweeping views daylong, but is especially stunning come sunset. The park’s Kanzan cherry trees, named after a Japanese mountain, possess football-shaped leaves and turn bronze when in bloom.

Sunset Park’s namesake park is located along 41st and 44th streets between 5th and 7th avenues.