Although I have lived in Tokyo for quite a long time, there are still many places of interest and famous parks that I have never visited. This time, I cleared one of them.
Horikiri-Shobuen. It is located a few minutes walk from the same name station on the Keisei Electric Railway line.
I visited there in early June. The garden was in full bloom.
According to what I have learned, the iris does not like to keep growing in the same place. Therefore, in order to keep them blooming, it is necessary to divide and replant them every few years. The Horikiri-Shobuen is not a very large garden, but the garden has been able to produce a wide variety of flowers by dividing the plants and taking the time and effort to do so.
For the first time in a while, I brought out my Lumix G99 and three Pana-Leica lenses to take iris shots.
To sum up, it was quite difficult to capture this flower. I felt like I was 10 years too early.
There are two main reasons why I find it difficult.
(1) The flowers are large and complex in shape, so that it’s difficult to find an ideally beautiful and well-formed flower. Even if you are lucky enough to find one, it may be too far away, or there may be a plant next to it that is not in good condition, so it may be reflected in the photo, or it may be easily disintegrated by the wind.
(2) The color of the flowers is very subtle, and there are too many different variations to be lumped together as blue-purple. When viewed on a camera monitor, it does not seem to reproduce the actual color, and even if I tried to adjust the color later, I would have to rely on my no-reliable memory.
The flowers introduced here are all beautiful, but they are far from the ideal “that shape”, and if you ask me if the color was really like this….
I can easily compare in my memory with the colors of these clear-cut stocks,
The irises planted in the park come in a wide variety of colors, patterns, and shapes, and many of them have subtle hues.
There is a small pond where you can take pictures of irises intertwined with lotus flowers, but perhaps because of the high temperatures this year, the algae were too thick and looked a bit odd.
The flowers on the right side of above photo, for example, are the best example of a vague memory color that cannot be reproduced or adjusted. I think it was a little more pale reddish, or something like this…it’s difficult to reproduce.
Now, let’s look at the iris in this garden,
There are about 200 varieties of irises in this garden, including rare ones, mainly historical Edo flowers, and each of them has a very venerable and poetic name, but being a lazy person, I did not write down or remember every single one of them.
For more information about the effort to plant so many different kinds of flowers randomly (so that they can be seen) and to keep them under control for many years, please visit this site.
After being showered with such a wide variety of flowers, I thought that I like white irises because they look innocent and clean, though not necessarily because they are easy to reproduce in color. Is it meh?
If I had taken a walk around the park, I might have been able to expand the story a little more, but it turned out to be an article that relentlessly took pictures of only flowers and arranged them in a row.
So, that’s all for now.
