Winter pics of Seattle Japanese Garden

by aleks
Last Friday, sunny but really cold for Seattle standards, and the day before she flew back to her sub-tropical home in Australia, Marilyn and I decided to visit Seattle Japanese Garden, officially closed for winter, just to see how it looks like at this time of the year.  Patty the gardener kindly let us in through the back-gate and below is what we saw as we trekked around, carefully avoiding ice-covered bridges and stepping stones:  lot of frost and sleets of ice on the pond...

SJG • 1/11/13 - Magnificent trunk of our old acer palmatum dissectum,
seen from the connector path - note the frost on the mundo grass across the path:(

SJG • 1/11/13 - All white west side of the Garden,
where sun has trouble to reach over the nearby hill 

SJG • 1/11/13 - Ice on the pond

SJG • 1/11/13 - white and green suhama's  (beach) end

SJG • 1/11/13 - Weeping willow on the sunnier east side of the Garden

SJG • 1/11/13 - Aha!  That's how gardeners reach Turtle Island when you are not looking :)

SJG • 1/11/13 - Saucer Magnolia past the zigzag bridge on the W path has buds
and is ready for flowering soon, but I decided to capture its whole silhouette  instead
- Patty gave it this attractive pixie haircut last fall

Many camellias have buds, and will be flowering soon!  It's quite a sight to see them so defiant in this weather, especially knowing that soon they'll put up a magnificent show - last year i captured quite a few of them in the act: you can go to the Bloom Blog, click on listed camellias and start salivating....  Before we left we decided to check on the most lionhearted of the camellias, usually blooming before the gates of the Garden open- we were not disappointed to find many bright pink buds and a lonely brave flower already:

SJG • 1/11/13 - Camellia daikagura
(right past the fork on the main path, as it bends  onto E path)

Btw, Marilyn hopes to become a guide in the Garden, as she spends considerable amount of time in Seattle; we met last summer, at her previous visit to our town - she was just leaving the Garden and decided to stop by and join SJG guides' group gathered to watch 'Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire' - a part of the 2004 PBS documentary series in our last year's Japanese Films in Tateuchi Room pilot project.

__________________

Kobayashi Issa, 1818

.我門は無きずな旦も小霜哉

waga kado wa mukizuna asa mo ko shimo kana

at my gate

a flawless little patch...

morning frost

Translated by David Lanoue