2025 Cherry Blossoms Wrap-Up
The 2025 DC cherry blossom bloom was beautiful, as usual, but it was also unusually brief.
Now that the famous cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin are done, it’s time to wrap up the 2025 season. It has been a very short bloom, but as usual, also beautiful.
The cherry blossoms reached peak bloom on March 28, 2025. While that’s early in the broader historical sweep since 1921 when they started keeping records of it, it’s actually pretty much normal if you’re looking at recent decades. That’s because the bloom has been trending earlier as temperatures rise.
There were no revisions to the peak bloom forecasts that were originally issued in late February or the beginning of March, and most of them were either right on the money or very close to the mark.
It was overall a remarkably calm lead-up to peak bloom. After a relatively cool winter, warmer temperatures in early March brought a quick flurry of activity around mid-March that then settled into a slow and steady pace of progress until the full bloom.
But the most notable thing about the bloom was how brief it was, with the blossoms lasting only about four to five days after peak bloom. That has happened before (see, for example, 2014), but it’s on the short end of what we can typically expect. They can last up to a couple of weeks in good conditions, but the weather didn’t cooperate this year.
Peak bloom came on a Friday, and it was the beginning of several days of very warm weather. A lovely weekend of cherry blossom viewing followed, but a wave of strong storms and torrential rain on Monday night brought much of the bloom to a quick conclusion. A few trees lingered, but it was overall a very quick bloom (unlike 2024, which just seemed to keep going on).
The Tidal Basin Seawall Reconstruction Project continued on through the bloom, but it mostly affected just the southern corner of the Tidal Basin, leaving most stretches and most trees available for visitors to enjoy.
So as a wrap-up, here’s a small selection of photos I took from this year’s bloom. And you can find separately some beautiful photos that CherryBlossomWatch readers took.
Thanks for following along, and I hope to see you again for 2026!
Visiting from out of town?
If you’re coming in from out of town to see the cherry blossoms, I’ve put together some resources that I hope you find useful.
And there’s plenty else to see while you’re here, so I’ll feature some of those things from my ExploreDC site here to give some inspiration and a sense of what to expect.
Where to Stay. Some local recommendations.
How Long Do the Cherry Blossoms Last? And some fallbacks if you miss them.