Category: Urban Essays

Getting back to the Horticultural Park

It was a nice warm day, and we went to Hanahata Horticultural Park, which is in the part of Fukuoka to the south of our house, for the first time in quite a while.
It was Sunday, so there weren’t many busses heading for the park. We walked little by little because there was time until the next bus came, and then finally we were there. (In short, we walked all the way there.)
It was probably our first time to go there since the cherry blossoms were in full bloom four years ago?
The plums are almost finished and the cherry flowers are not in bloom yet, but walking in the park is still enjoyable.

This was originally Fukuoka prefecture’s horticultural laboratory so there are many fruit trees. We recommend the greenhouse for fruits from southern countries.

Pear, apple, grape, kiwi, etc.: there are many trees but only one of the cherry trees and some apricot trees had flowers. We looked closely at the apricot tree, and found that it has a fun way of flowering. The branches also grow in amazing shapes, and some flowers bloom directly from the trunk; we found it’s very strange.

Birds alit on the almost-finished plum flowers! Chris took many photos of the tail sides of Japanese white-eyes, because they flew very fast, but finally he took its cute photo! After that, we visited noisy ducks at the pond where they had attacked us aggressively before; but are there fewer of them now? They were very quiet! While we were walking around the pond, we saw a caution for hornets. Of course we quickly left there.

Finally, simply a nice photograph of poppies, like a post card!

– YS, 17 March 2008

18 March 2008