Category Archives: Flowers

Today-morrow

I have jet lag over the international date line so my computer, which doesn’t seem to update, says it’s yesterday. But yesterday’s gone.

My approach to jet lag is to go a couple of days early and spend them wandering around outside in natural light. The first day went well, today it rained, real rain with periodic gusts of wind. But I get ahead of myself.

On Thursday, June 1st I went to Sawara to work on my jet lag. It was a pleasant outing from Narita where I’m staying at the moment. I took a local train out.

View from the train window.

Walked through the old part of the city along the canal. They have some interesting little statues along the canal.

I then took a bus out to the Aquatic Botanical Garden, which is in it’s Iris Festival. They have a lot of beautiful iris. Some waterlilies were blooming. The wisteria was done for the year and the lotus weren’t flowering yet, although they have interesting leaves. The weather was perfect: not too hot or cold. There was a bit of wind

I had a bit of a wait for the train.

Sawara train station.

I didn’t fall asleep on the train and miss my stop. A not unfounded fear, as the sunshine and motion of the train were hypnotic and my eyelids kept drooping.

For Alive and Trekking’s Which Way and Cee’s Flower of the Day…actually yesterday.

Bright red ghosts

Almost every year at Christmas time I buy an amaryllis bulb. I love their bright colors, textures and elegant shapes. Just throwing away something alive has always felt wrong, so I now have several ghosts of Christmases past, in the form of amaryllis bulbs.

They re-bloom every year. Left to their own devices, which is my general approach to gardening, they seem to have settled on March. Six of them are going at it right now.

One thing is pretty clear: I need to clean my windows!

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

If you look up close…

These aren’t what you normally think of when you think of spring flowers, but, if you look very close, you can see that these alder catkins are clusters of little dark pink flowers.

From a distance the alders have a pink/orange patina due to the color of the catkins (they are the deciduous trees with the light trunks).

For Cee’s Flower of the Day and Denzil Nature Photo Challenge: Pink.