Bridge, Japanese Garden of Tranquility

This past weekend, we visited the Memphis Botanic Garden, which is beautiful any time of year. This bridge is located in one of our favorite areas of the Botanic Garden, the Japanese Garden of Tranquility.

The Japanese Garden was originally designed by Dr. P.T. Tono of Tokyo in 1965. This garden was redesigned in 1989 by the late Dr. Koichi Kawana, who designed more than a dozen Japanese gardens for botanic gardens around the country. He worked closely with local landscape architect J. Ritchie Smith on this project. Dr. Kawana pioneered the use of native plants in traditional Japanese garden design. You can read more about Dr. Kawana and his work and see a photo of him here. You can also read more about Memphis Botanic Garden's history here.

Do you have a botanic garden to visit nearby?

Sunny Yellow Tulips...

At the Botanic Garden, I couldn't look at these without smiling! I hope that they bring a smile to your face, too!

Happy Spring!

Flowering Dogwood...

Isn't this dogwood magnificent? This is one of my favorite flowering trees during each Spring in Memphis.

I hope that you're having a great weekend so far. This is a busy one for us with family activities, but I am looking forward to taking a little time for some blog-visiting, too!

Cherry Trees In All Their Glory

The cherry trees in full blossom just outside of the Memphis Botanic Garden...it doesn't get much prettier than this! (Be sure to click on this one to see the entire width of the photo).

Sunny Forsythia

Isn't Forsythia a day-brightener? Ours are almost past peak here, and I wanted to share this with you before the time passes. I'm glad that we took quite a few Spring photos previously, as this weekend was rainy, rainy.

I hope that your weekend was a good one!

More Tulips

These tulips at the Memphis Botanic Garden were almost done, but I thought this color combination was especially pretty. I know that a lot of you north of me are still seeing some wintry weather, but I will certainly be enjoying your pretty Spring when it's already hot, hot, hot here in the South. My mother and grandmother used to say "it's as hot as blue blazes" during the summer; have you ever heard that phrase?

Cherry Blossoms...

I'm so glad that you're enjoying the spring blooms in Memphis with me. Our Spring is usually about two weeks, with an almost direct jump from Winter to Summer, and the season is seeming particularly nice and leisurely this year.

The Cherry blossoms are almost at peak, and should be just gorgeous by this weekend. We are supposed to have rain during the next few days, so I hope that the blossoms will weather that well (if not, I have a great photo of the trees at peak from last Spring). These trees line the public drive along Audubon Golf Course in front of the Botanic Garden, so if you are in Memphis and want to see them in person, you can just drive through...but the Botanic Garden is a great place to visit if you have time.

A Little More Spring...

Thanks to all of you for such a warm welcome back! I really did miss all of you while I was away...you meet some of the nicest people blogging.

I promise that I won't be posting flower photos ad nauseam all Spring...but these purple tulips at the Botanic Garden posted yesterday were just too pretty to keep to myself. I discovered the macro setting on my point-n-shoot camera while in Florida, and I'm still learning to play with it. Having a perfectly clear, sunlit day doesn't hurt either, does it?

My younger son is using the computer for his term paper tonight, so I'm posting while he's taking a break. I hope to do some blog-visiting either later tonight or tomorrow evening. I hope that your week is going well so far!

Spring Is Here!

We just returned to Memphis from Florida, and found that Spring had officially arrived in Memphis, too! Today was gorgeous, so we stopped at the Memphis Botanic Garden and took a few photos around the front grounds (the rest is even more amazing). When we have more time soon, we'll take a photo tour of the entire grounds. I thought that you might enjoy seeing this happy, Spring-y tulip mix today. This time period---now through May---is my favorite time in Memphis.

We had a great trip, spending most of our time in Jupiter and West Palm Beach, FL. We saw five Spring Training baseball games (mostly Cardinals games), including the final Dodgers game in Dodgertown, Vero Beach, FL. It was also Tommy LaSorda's final time at that facility, and it was a very poignant, bittersweet moment. We took lots of photos and I hope to have them all in order to share soon.

I missed all of you, and I know that I missed lots of great photos...I can't wait to catch up!