About the Cherry Blossom Watch

I’m a professional travel and destination photographer based in Washington DC. You can see more of my work elsewhere on my main site on on my Washington DC-focused site.

The Cherry Blossom Watch is something I originally started around 2010. I often found myself down around the Tidal Basin and National Mall during the spring as I was out and about shooting photos. And I figured I may as well share what I was seeing.

Over the years, it’s become clear that readers appreciate the updates so they can see for themselves how the cherry blossoms are looking. Many readers have been following along and contributing year after year. And that’s really what gives the Cherry Blossom Watch life. It’s something I’ve come to look forward to each spring. I’m lucky enough to have the opportunity to be able to travel to destinations all over the globe, and the blooming of Washington DC’s cherry blossoms in such a beautiful setting really is a world-class event.

I should make clear that I’m not connected in any way to the National Cherry Blossom Festival or the National Park Service. I’m not a travel agent and can’t make travel bookings for you (though I can make some recommendations on where to stay and how to get there). And I don’t issue my own predictions for the peak bloom for the simple reason that I can’t improve on the forecasts issued by the experts at the National Park Service and the weather data crunchers at the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. It gets confusing enough without me adding yet another stab in the dark. What I can do is bring together the latest cherry blossom news and provide regular on-the-ground reports from the Tidal Basin to take some of the guess work out of it.

With the photos I post on the cherry blossom watch updates, my aim is to give readers an overall visual sense of how it really looks at the location rather than focusing only on the photogenic parts. I make sure to take photos of multiple trees to illustrate the range of variations at any given time. Travel photographers have all sorts of techniques at their disposal to make any given location look its best, but I deliberately don’t do that with the cherry blossom watch updates. What I try to do is give an accurate representation of what visitors might expect to see if they were there in person. Sometimes it’s a glorious view. Sometimes it’s less so.

Please note that all information I offer on this site is offered in good faith and is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate at the time I post it. For the schedule of the bloom, I rely heavily on the forecasts issued by the groups above, and it’s not at all unusual for the bloom forecasts to change as we get closer to the date. I don’t have a special crystal ball that gives me special abilities to predict the future, and while I can offer my opinions and educated guesses, I make absolutely no claims of certainty and can guarantee nothing. So please bear that in mind when making your plans to visit the cherry blossoms. What I try to do on this site is provide good information to help you make your own informed decisions.

If you’d like to contact me, you can reach me here. If you have a question about visiting the cherry blossoms, the comments are often a better and quicker way to get a response because you can get the benefit of other locals offering their advice too. You’ll find the Cherry Blossom Watch Facebook page and Cherry Blossom Watch Instagram pages also useful. There are many locals who actively participate on both and can provide good information for visitors.

So I hope you find it useful, and welcome!

cheers,
David.