For most cherry sites the beginning is vague. Here it is on the record. In 1902 the botanist Tomitaro Makino, who was born in Sakawa, sent home saplings of Somei-yoshino that he had found at Somei in Tokyo, and local residents planted them on the embankment at Seigen-ji and the ground around it, according to the Sakawa tourism association. The hill took the name Makino Park in 1958, when the town road running through it was finished.

The planting today comes to about 350 trees of about thirty varieties.

That is roughly one variety for every twelve trees. Other sites on this list of a hundred run to three thousand trees of essentially one kind, planted to raise a single wall of colour in a single week. Thirty kinds in three hundred and fifty is the opposite arrangement, closer to a collection than to a display, and it opens and fades in stages instead of all at once.

Partway up the slope is Makino's own grave, beside that of Mitsuaki Tanaka, a politician also from Sakawa, so the man who sent the first saplings is still on the hill they were planted on. The timing given on this page is not the town's: no peak-bloom period is published for the park, and the range here comes from the weather record for Kochi, where full bloom falls on 30 March in the 1991 to 2020 average.