bluebell report

in japan right now, we are in the middle of spring break. people have gone on holiday somewhere. me? i do love spending this pleasant season staying at home (no, not because of the swine flu pandemic), because, you know, i have a beautiful park adjacent to the premise of my flat. so i couldn’t be happier to find spring flowers, especially bluebells, in my park than going anyplace crowded. for me, bluebells associates with springtime in london. many english people associate magnolias or rhododendrons with spring, maybe. the bluebells took my breath away when i had a walk in the park between sprinkles of rain last sunday.

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in retrospect, i was a big fan of cocteau twins who sang “blue bell knoll” in the late 80’s when i lived in london. over there, bluebells could be seen anywhere. but sadly, i lost my own favourite photos of a bluebell wood of newbury. i can get identical images from here or blogs like vanya’s, though. also, i once had an opportunity of working on a magazine assignment with a renowned japanese photographer ages ago. we had a photo-shoot at kew gardens. that image of the bluebells seems to remain in my mind for good. by the way, i believed those ones were common bluebells. perhaps, the ones i now see in my park are spanish bluebells, which, i’ve just learned, invade areas of native common bluebells in england. so they are precious now.

the bluebell season looked nearly over when i had a walk yesterday. still, i could enjoy sort of a residue of the english spring image. i sometimes spotted a white variant in london. in fact, i’m always attracted to white or greenish flowers. along with bluebells, clearly green hellebore also passed their prime, however. now that white lace flowers (orlaya grandiflora) must be the queens of the garden in my park. there were other whites such as tulips and 姫空木 hime-utsugi (deutzia gracilis). if you took a closer look at flowers, you would find tiny green creatures like a spider and a grasshopper busy working on them. despite the fact that i have a terrible arachno-phobia, that was another lovely discovery!

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trees were beautiful, too. 花水木 hanamizuki (dogwood) can never be an eye-opener, but it brightened up the path in woodlands. do you remember my post on 梅 woo-may (prunus mume) blossom back in february? when i walked through the 梅 orchard, i saw swelling green fruits on the branches already rounding. and, what about the post on burning 紅葉momiji? lacy soft green leaves, trembling to the breeze, now made me a green canopy while walking up to the main path. then, on my way home, i found that each 柊南天 hiiragi-nannten (mahonia japonica) in the shrub near my flat had dozens of fruits, which exactly look like gems of jade.

back in my living room, a couple of white bawls of lace-up hydrangea, a new face among my pot-plants, looked just serene. for me, it was heaven on earth, for a moment or two.