Communing with Nature

A while ago a friend of mine was telling me about a drawing meet-up she went to, in Hakone Gardens. It was on the one day in the past five months when we had 15 minutes of rain, but I was interested in the venue, so I went there last week.

Hakone touts itself as the oldest “Japanese estate gardens” in the western world. Whatever. (Frankly, any organization that officially uses a plural subject with a singular verb has cracked its own credibility with me.)

But I thought it would be nice to get out into, you know, Nature. Even if it is carefully crafted. (Maybe especially if it’s carefully crafted.) So I took my cameras and spent a couple of hours wandering about the place…not exactly lonely as a cloud, but not bad. It's not a patch on the Huntington Gardens, where I grew up, but it'll do.

Naturally there’s the obligatory waterfall:

  

And the koi pond with bridge:

But I quite liked the persimmon tree:

Which is rather odd, as I was traumatized as a child by the persimmon tree in our back yard. (The little unripe fruit that drops are like acorns when your bare feet find them. And the ripe ones that fall squish between your toes are so gicky. For the life of me I can’t feature ever actually, you know, eating one.)

As I said earlier this week, we don’t get a lot of leaves turning colors here in the Valley they call Silicon, but the Japanese maples there afforded me a couple of splashes. First this one:

And then this:

And that’s about my limit for nature.