Visiting the Seattle Japanese Garden in the Spring

Dora and I went to the Seattle Japanese Garden this week, while Gohan was doing his annual standardized testing. I had thought that as part of our tree studies, we would look at the cherry trees, assuming there would be many in a Japanese garden. While, cherry blossoms abound in the Seattle area, there was nary a one to be found in the gardens… Or so I thought at first. It ends up that there are some cherry trees in the Japanese Gardens, in fact they even have their own plaque, but they do not look like the cherry tree blossoms that I am used to. The ones that we have around Seattle, which ironically do not produce cherries BTW, look like these (photo source Wikipedia):

The cherry trees that are at the Seattle Japanese Gardens, look like these:

A close-up of the plaque that Dora is “reading” in the photo above,  

The photos don’t quite make it clear, but the Mt. Fuji Cherry blossoms are about four times larger than the ones that we usually see.

Another major attraction of the Japanese Gardens is the koi pond, which really is large enough to be called a lake. Unfortunately, visitors are not allowed to feed the koi during the cooler months, but Dora spent about half an hour watching the koi anyway.

The turtles in the pond are alive and will eventually move, if you watch them long enough.

I’m not sure what the source for the stream that runs through the Japanese Garden is, but the water seemed to be flowing faster now than it has been in the fall.

This was the first time that Dora was able to navigate the stepping stones by herself and she was rather proud of herself for it. There are several places where you can either cross the by  bridge or stepping stones. Needless to say, Dora always chose the stepping stones.

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