The cherry trees along the Nikko Kaido run for about sixteen kilometres. They line both sides of the old highway between Utsunomiya and Nikko, roughly fifteen hundred of them, mostly wild cherry rather than the Somei-yoshino you see in parks. Sixteen kilometres is a full day if you walk it.

That is the unusual part. Cherry avenues are normally built at a length a person can cover: a park path, a stretch of riverbank, the road round a castle. This one was not built to be covered at all.

The Nikko Kaido was a working highway, laid out in the Edo period to move people and goods north to the shrines. The trees came later, but they follow the road rather than the other way round, and there is no gate, no entrance, no point at which the avenue begins.

Driving it in the first half of April, you pass through sections in flower, sections still tight, and sections already down, in whatever order the ground and the shade decide. Three stages of the same season on one road on one afternoon. The timing given on this page is not the tourist association's; no average is published, so it is derived from the weather record for Utsunomiya. Check the year's own reports before you go.