New cherry trees are still being found inside this castle. Kumamoto city writes that a cherry was found on the grounds which could not be matched to any existing cultivar. It bears red and white flowers, it has been given the name Yasohime, and the city says it intends to set out the form of the flowers and leaves in a paper submitted to a botanical journal, with the aim of naming and publishing it as a new cultivar.

The city has also mapped the varieties across the grounds.

Its list runs in order of flowering: yamazakura, Somei-yoshino, oshima-zakura, chihara-zakura, shidare-zakura, beni-shidare, yae-beni-shidare, kanzan, gyoiko and ukon. Ten kinds in sequence means the castle does not have one cherry season but a run of them, and a map exists because the difference between those ten is not obvious to somebody standing underneath.

That is a botanist's way of holding a castle. Most sites on the national list of a hundred are counted in trees, and the count is nearly always of one variety planted at one time. Here the interesting number is ten, and the eleventh is a tree nobody has a name for yet. The timing given on this page is not the city's. No peak-bloom period is published for the castle, and the range here comes from the weather record for Kumamoto, where full bloom falls on 1 April in the 1991 to 2020 average.