The Japanese pride themselves on their gardening skills, and based on this example, that pride is justified. This was an amazing garden near Nagoya. It was huge and beautiful. Only the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, exceed this garden for beauty among the places I have been. It was a very hot and sunny day when we visited. It was a lot of fun, but tiring. There was a ton of walking.
The Gardens
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| The umbrella was not for any rain! |
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The gardens were so well kept and beautifully organized, it was amazing, and the variety of flowers was just dizzying.
A little glimpse of how they organize the gardens. You can see on the bare ground that there are chalk lines laid out, with a designated area for each kind or color of bloom. There were workers planting in this area as we strolled the grounds.
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| You can see the chalk outlines where the flowers are to be planted. |
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When I saw the pansies, I thought of my grandfather Shultis, who always planted pansies around his house. He was quite a gardener. As a young man he had worked on the Westinghouse estate in nearby Lenox as a gardener and he carried those skills with him all his life. He had roses and a super vegetable garden, too.
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| They only had this one variety of white pansy. My grandpa's were better! |
Begonias
The stars of the show in this garden, as far as I was concerned, were the begonias. I have never seen, nor even imagined, such an array of colors and shapes and sizes. They were kept indoors (for a separate admission), and when I opened the door and saw the flowers, I emitted an involuntary "wow."
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| This picture has the feeling of an Impressionist painting |
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I don't know whether the flowers were more impressive one at a time or as a group. Either way, they were stunning.
The greenhouse had flowers besides begonias, too.
Ice Cream
After you got through the greenhouse, there was a snack bar that sold ice cream. Flower flavored ice cream. Hard to resist on a hot day. I had begonia and there was blueberry and I can't recall the other flavors. In my defense, the signs were in Japanese.
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| Reika eating begonia flavored ice cream. I tried some, too and it was good. |
2 comments:
Beautiful flowers and pictures. The Begonia house sure looks awesome. I never went to a formal garden in Japan when I was there but Susan and I went several times to one in Hawaii while we lived there. It does make a nice afternoon walk. We enjoyed that but then we were much younger then. That was BC (before children). I am glad you enjoyed it. You obviously are in Japan on vacation. Vacations, do you have those anymore now that you are retired? Or do they become a break from mundane retirement?
Ray
Ray, I would say that our occasional trips are vacations, we call them that, and they are a break from the hum-drum of plain retirement.
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