Rose garden and orange orchard in the Izu peninsula

Orange Orchard

Last week, the entire family spent the weekend at the hot spa resort of Atagawa, Izu Peninsula in Japan. We visited a wonderful rose garden and an orange orchard. The orchard was a “mikan gari” which means you pay a fixed charge and they give you a pair of scissors that you take with you and pick any number of oranges you want and eat them on the spot! The charge per head was a reasonable 400 yen (about 4.5 dollars).

View from the orange orchard overlooking the sea and the island of Oshima in the distance

Pick as many as you like but eat ‘em!

Delicious oranges waiting to be picked and eaten!

The trees were planted in a terraced garden – it appears that these oranges don’t like cold, and such an arrangement is quite suitable for growing oranges, so the owner told me.

This was a fun place and I like the concept. The owner does not need labor to pick oranges, the visitors would gladly pay the reasonable charge and have a good time eating as many oranges as they like – a mutually-beneficial arrangement. The owner even picked us up from the railway station and dropped us back after the visit. We had a great time at this orchard. Japan has various “eat-as-much-as-you-like” orchards including strawberry, pear, grapes and so on.

 

Rose Garden

We visited the Bagatelle Park, about 10 minutes by bus from Kawazu station in the afternoon. It was opened, in a tie-up with the park of the same name in Paris. Three of the park’s five hectares are devoted to a reproduction of the Paris park’s Rose Garden, thus recreating the atmosphere of the French capital in the 18th century.

Entrance to the Bagatelle Rose Garden

The garden included some magnificent specimens of roses – let the photos speak for themselves!

Yellow roses

Pink

Yellow with tinges of pink

Light pink

Creamy

Red

We had our fill of oranges and roses and returned to Tokyo tired but happy!

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Local Japanese gardens

This Sunday I visited a local seaside park facing the Tokyo Bay. The local newsletter had featured an announcement that a park called the Sodegaura Kaihin Park would hold a festival with the first 200 entrants to the park presented with plants. I was pretty excited and hoped to find lots of flowering plants, maybe a botanical garden too!

Upon entering the park, two of the officials gave me a map of the park – it seemed to be fairly large by Japanese standards. I saw a high viewing platform and a large windmill within the park, that had large lawns, palm trees lining the paved paths, plenty of space for kids to play, clean toilets and a splendid view of the Tokyo Bay including the Aqualine, an bridge-cum-undersea tunnel linking Kisarazu, (the city where I stay) to Kawasaki, Tokyo and Yokohama. 

  

Platform (left) and panoramic view (bridge-cum-tunnel in the sea can be seen on the right in enlarged view)

I ambled over to a tent-like structure where volunteers presented me with some marigold plants, a packet of Dianthus seeds, calorie mate and some pamphlets.

    Presents to visitors (left) and tent-like structure (right)

 Barring some camelias and a huge wind propeller that generated around 180 MW of power, there wasn’t much to hold my interest, so I decided to visit Sodegaura Koen, a large and popular Japanese garden not far away from this place.

Wind power in park	Camelia

The Sodegaura Park, one of my favorites, was holding a chrysanthemum festival with the best flowers to be awarded prizes. The exhibits were amazing and  I was delighted to see bonsais of chrysanthemum flowers too. The photos here speak for themselves!

Chrysanthemums entered for the contest (click to enlarge)

The bonsai exhibits were the best I have ever seen.

Bonsai – chrysanthemums

 

More Bonsai exhibits – chrysanthemums

I also met an elderly Japanese couple who introduced me to seeds of the Castanopsis cuspidata, lying on the path that ran around a lake within the park. These seeds are edible and taste quite nice. It appears that during their youth, these seeds were sold and were quite popular, but not many people bother to pick these up nowadays.

 Castanopsis cuspidata seeds (left) and a scene from the Sodegaura Park (right)

 

The park is in full of flowers in spring and the beginning of autumn, but with winter soon to come, the flowers in the park in bloom were mainly chrysanthemum, serbia, and a sprinkling of cosmos, and of course, with plenty of ducks, swans and the Japanese carp in the waters.

Flowers in bloom at the Sodegaura Park

Birds in the park 

Have a great day!

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Technorati Tags: Japanese gardens,chrysanthemum,serbia,begonia