On the first warm night of spring, at the end of a particularly draining day of work and news, a friend texted to see if I wanted to come over for a drink on her deck. There was an urgency in the message — When? Now! She was gathering whomever might be around, which on a Thursday night at about 7:30 turned out to be three other people.

Occasioning all this was her cherry tree, a monumental Kanzan that canopies roughly two-thirds of her Brooklyn backyard and part of the one next door. It was in peak bloom and it might not be this magnificent in four days or even tomorrow.

Last Saturday, 22,000 people, a number greater than the seating capacity of the Barclays Center, visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, paying as much as $22 each to take in the long double rows of blossoming cherry trees that arched toward one another in a spectacular arboreal cathedral. There are 26 cherry tree varieties in the garden, including the Kanzans that line the cherry walk; most of them cultivars, rather than natives, and the first among them was planted in 1921.

The Kanzan is especially exquisite, because its pink double blossoms can contain as many as 28 petals each. The flowering period is short — usually only a week, perhaps two — and rain or any significant shift in temperature will curtail it.

There are few more powerful metaphors in the botanical world for the transient nature of beauty and the need to seize whatever chance might come along to experience it.