The cherry blossoms in Toronto's High Park will be in full bloom next Monday

The cherry blossoms in High Park are expected to bloom on schedule next week.

Peak bloom, when more than 70 percent of the flowers are open, begins on April 22 and is expected to last about 4-10 days, depending on weather conditions.

“We're on track, on schedule,” Rohit Rao, director of fundraising and communications for High Park Nature Center, told CTV News Toronto. “Peak bloom is usually late April to early May, and we're still on that schedule.”

According to Rao, if the city has cooler temperatures during the peak blooming period, people can see the flowers for longer, which was the case last year.

“If it's warmer, the flowers will grow faster and you'll have a relatively short peak bloom,” he said. “Usually it takes about a week and then you start to see the petals start to fall.

In 1959, Japan's ambassador to Canada, Toru-Hagiwara, donated 2,000 Somi-Yoshino sakura trees to the city on behalf of the people of Tokyo, in gratitude for Toronto's acceptance of Japanese-Canadians who had resettled after World War II.

The flowers now attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to the park each year. Blooming is a great sign of spring, Rao said.

Flowering is highly temperature dependent in late winter and early spring. According to Rao, they developed rapidly last week due to very warm temperatures.

“But later in the week we had some really cool weather and some cloudy conditions, which slowed the process down a little bit,” he said.

At this time, the flowers are in the fourth stage of the flowering process, when the stems of the flower are elongated and the individual flowers are clearly visible. At this stage, flowers are very vulnerable to frost.

In the next stage, usually four to six days before peak bloom, pale white sakura blossoms appear, with each flower opening at different times.

In the last stage, the sixth stage, the peak of flowering begins with the opening of most of the flowers.