Photo: Vince Hale, via iNaturalist, public domain / CC0. Unmodified apart from resizing.
Colour
pink, red, white
Region
Japan and temperate East Asia
Season
spring
Shape
single flower
Identification
A deciduous small tree usually 3 m tall, rarely 10 m, the crown as wide as it is high; no suckers or thorns, a deep root system. Dark grey bark with horizontal lenticels. Lanceolate leaves; flowers before or with the leaves, single or in pairs, almost stalkless and pressed to the branch, pink (white, deep red and double in ornamental forms), five-petalled with yellow anthers. Juicy fruit, fuzzy in peaches and smooth in nectarines. Short-lived, rarely over twenty years. Native to China and among the first domesticated fruit trees.
Habitat
Orchards, gardens, parks and field edges, the ornamental forms widely used in landscaping; peach-blossom festivals across China, and the Peach Blossom Spring is literature's utopia.
Distribution
Native to China and widely grown in the temperate world; common throughout China, cultivated throughout Japan (the flower of the Girls' Festival on the third of March), absent from Singapore.
Season and behaviour
March and April, slightly before or with the cherries, for a week to ten days; fruit ripens June to August.
Photography tips
These are the FilmAnalysis editors' notes, not content from the sources.
Peach flowers sit against the branch, so the line of a branch says more than one bloom; pink is truest in soft light, bleaching in front light and glowing against it. The dark branches are a ready contrast, with shade or blue sky behind. An orchard in bloom compresses with a long lens into layers of pink.
Photographic styles
Pink flowers pressed to dark branches; layers of pink in an orchard.
Similar species
Japanese apricot (earlier, stalked and scented flowers with round petals); cherry (long-stalked hanging clusters, notched petals); apricot (white tinged pink, reflexed sepals).
Related badge
The album badge "peach blossom" unlocks when the vision model explicitly names a peach blossom in your photo and you rate the analysis. The badge stops at "peach blossom": it does not tell species apart, and this page existing unlocks nothing.
The illustration is original FilmAnalysis artwork. The photograph is from iNaturalist; its licence and author are under it.
Why it is listed: this species comes from the Flower checklist (GBIF backbone and Wikidata verified). Names follow the GBIF backbone and Wikidata; the facts follow the sources below; photo recognition is not offered.
