There's a reason we flock to see cherry blossoms. This Waterloo prof explains why

Cherry blossoms are an iconic first sign of spring.

Every year, thousands of Canadians flock to gardens and parks to take in the beautiful light pink and white petals of the tree. 

Colin Ellard is a psychology professor at Ontario's University of Waterloo and director of the Urban Realities Lab, which studies the impact of urban design on human psychology. He explained to CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's Craig Norris, host of The Morning Edition, why people are obsessed with spring blooms.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the audio below.

Craig Norris: Why do we find cherry blossoms so alluring?

Colin Ellard: Well, I think it's kind of a triple whammy. The first thing is that cherry blossoms are kind of the earliest harbinger of spring. So we've gone through, in fact especially this year, it's been the darkest winter in what, 80 years. So we've gone through this long, protracted period of dismal greys and then suddenly there's this pop of colour.

And so at an esthetic level, just the difference between that and everything else that we've been exposed to has a tremendous impact on us. 

We know that the cherry blossom season is quite brief, even compared to other kinds of blossoming trees. It's a short pop.

But more fundamentally, human beings are generally attracted to scenes of nature. It's written into our DNA. In fact, this is something that goes way back to our prehistory. And the reasons have to do with — it's kind of the obvious thing that where we see nature, we see bounty. So we're predisposed to be drawn to, in fact to feel pleasure, when we see those kinds of scenes. 

And if you think about blossoms, blossoms are kind of the ultimate, because not only do they signal nature, but they also signal impending fruit. You know, what follows the blossom is normally something that we can eat.

CN: So it's evolutionary?

CE: Yeah, it really is.

CN: And it improves our moods overall, right? That's why we always say being out in nature improves our mood.

CE: That's right, it does. And in fact, there's some really interesting neuroscience to suggest that we are so hardwired to be drawn to scenes of nature that it's almost like something like runners' high. That we have brain circuits that aren't all that different to the circuits that attract us to other kinds of drivers, like food, that turn on when we see scenes of nature.