nihon no hana

Last week S. and I went for a walk downtown and looked at all the flowers. It was warm, in the low 70s, and a lovely day for a walk. We had fun discussing the various flowers, matching S's Japanese names with my English names. I recognise a lot of the flowers from where I grew up, but not many around here.

The tree to the right (taken at random from the Flickr photostream of lithoglyphic, who I know nothing of other than that she takes lovely pictures) is a mokuren, which in English is a saucer magnolia. They're everywhere right now, budding and blooming, shedding thick, waxy petals onto sidewalks and lawns. S. said that they have a beautiful fragrance, but the one we found downtown was too tall for us to sniff -- despite jumping a few times to try to reach the lowest flowers.

Searching the web this evening, I found a wonderful page of photos of Japanese flowers. Now I know what Japanese peach blossoms look like, and the boke (quince) blossoms are lovely.

Maybe by next week I'll have made my camera functional again, and can take some photos before the wind blows all the petals away. There's a white sakura by the church downtown that's so perfect it could be a painting.