Ooh! Tsuyu Sir!

We're all up early at the weekend to get down to some serious ojisan-jostling at the Kobe Municipal Arboretum, which boasts a fine collection of hydrangea - ajisai - and a spectacularly boring promotional video.

June is tsuyu, or rainy season in Japan, and rain is good for ajisai. The hydrangea is known as the fickle flower, on account of its ability to change colour according to the pH level of the soil, in a sort of litmus-paper-defying way, if I remember my school science lessons correctly (blue when the soil is acid, pink when alkaline). The samurai hated them apparently, because they associated change of colour with change of loyalty, but then it probably wasn't the done thing for the warrior class to confess to liking shrubs.

We're starting to notice something of a pattern now on our floral exploits. Whenever there's a flower to be looked at, there's a boatload of them. The arboretum reckons they have around 50,000 hydrangeas, although they seemed to have an equal number of old folk with an equal number of megapixels at their disposal.

I think that's about it for flowers this year. We'll miss the sunflowers in late July as we'll be back home for a few weeks, and that's about it until chrysanthemums again in September. My snapshot nemesis, Inamura-san, has thrown down another challenge - flowers from Ireland versus flowers from Japan. I looked up which flowers are in abundance in Northern Ireland in July and all I could find was the daisy, so I think we'll pass on that one.