Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Botanical Garden

The weather was nice enough to spend some time here.

This garden is so vast that little kids could be lost without their parents. You can see greenhouses, one of which has plants that are usually in the savanna.

Though you can have only canned drinks from the vending machines, you would wish to stay here forever.

A palm tree that is resistant to the coldness in the winter in Japan.

You can see lots of cactuses inside the greenhouse that would die in the wild of Japan.

These are called "Echinocactus grusonii" from Mexico.

You can see the distribution of endangered species across Japan.

They were showing some experiments to the public.


My city has many government-funded Institutes, and we can visit some of them during the summer. But this botanical garden is open to the public all through the year as long as people pay about 3 us dollars per person. I said before that my city has lots of parks, but if I truly want to be surrounded by nature and relax, this is the place to go to.

This garden is visited not only by those who's interested in plants, but by the elderly, school children who want to learn something about mother nature. In fact there are many explanatory boards before each plant, and people can learn not only about Japanese plants but also foreign kinds that are preserved in the greenhouses so that they can survive in Japan.

The best season to visit this garden is the spring, but as the temperature is mild also in the fall in Japan, I could see many people. I have to say my pictures often don't include many people, but I've tried to avoid taking pics of people because of their privacy. And this place was indeed having more people than usual presumably from other prefectures.