Portland: Japanese Garden (part 1)

Last month during the Garden Bloggers Fling in Portland, I excused myself from the planned tour for the day (Saturday) and spent the time sightseeing with my wife instead. It turns out that we went to a few of the same places where the bloggers would be touring, but as we had no schedule we could stroll at our own pace.

Saturday morning we headed to the Portland Japanese Garden, and since I took so many photos there, I'm breaking them up into two posts. In addition I've spent a lot of time trying to find the narrative for this post but I don't know that there's much to be said, so after a brief intro I'll let the photos do the talking.

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If you've ever visited a Japanese garden or have an idea of what one might contain, this garden has it. Although smaller than the Japanese garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden, this one has the advantage of being built on a hillside, so beautiful views are easier to create (are they?) -- and they are everywhere!

A large portion of the garden is in deep shade, so some of these photos were a challenge to capture with my older camera, but I hope seeing these give you a good sense not only of the scenes that have been created, but the details that make any great garden worth scrutinizing.

(These are shown roughly in the order in which they were taken.)

You can see how my attention shifts between the wide views and the details quite regularly. Such a great place!

More tomorrow...

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