kangaroo paw

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    Going Out To Lunch With Godzilla

    I’m fortunate enough to work within a short stroll from Godzilla, the (sometime) scourge of Japan and frequent destroyer of Tokyo. I took advantage of my lunch break to head down to visit Japan’s most famous monster. Of course, it’s not the real Godzilla, otherwise I probably wouldn’t get much work done. It’s a statue of the monster located in front of headquarters of Toho Co., Ltd., the movie studio that gave the world Godzilla. I also got to look at a quaint little garden filled with Aussie plants. Then, this morning, amid an ongoing period with a heavy workload, it was nice to get back on the bike. Even…

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    Snow In The Summer Is Only Supposed To Be A Name

    In an uncustomary May I was absolutely delighted to poke my head out of our backdoor and see a lovely little white blossom greeting me. The flower was on our melaleuca linariifolia, a tree generally known as the snow in the summer. It gets that name because it blooms when the sun shines hardest, so my astonishment arose as this month has been dark and wet for the most part, as it is again today. The weather’s been so bad I wouldn’t be surprised to see us get a fair dinkum dose of snow. The melaleuca are part of the mrytle family, and we have another tree in the garden…

  • Beautiful Blooms Brighten Drab Days

    May in Tokyo is usually my favorite time of year because it is customarily warm, dry and sunny, perhaps coming closest to what I imagine were the seemingly endless summer days of my childhood in Australia. But this year, the weather has been a bit bleak with more overcast days and cooler, cloudier days than I’d usually associate with the normally idyllic lead-up to the rainy season. Fortunately, the flowers have come to the fore to provide some brightness. Our grevillea has flourished and keeps spurting forth flower after flower, bringing immense delight as it has done since we planted the garden. Another superstar this year, albeit a bit less…

  • Suburban Tokyo’s Little Slice Of The Godzone

    Aussies like to call our country the Godzone, a corruption of the phrase “God’s Own Country,” and we’ve been lucky enough to replicate a little bit of that zone in the suburbs of Tokyo. Thanks to the talents of the amazing Alex Endo, Japan’s premier author on Australian plants and designer of gardens using Aussie natives, we have an incredible Aussie garden. Late spring in the lead-up to the rainy season is when the garden puts on its finest show. Nearly everywhere is lush and green. But there is also an explosion of color and beauty as the flowers spring forth. We have the scarlet of the callistemon. The burning…

  • Brushing Up On Kangaroo Paw-nography

    Caught up with work, study, travel, health checks and poor weather over the past few days, it was a delight to get back into the garden this morning to find that we were blessed with the season’s first bottlebrush and kangaroo paw flowers. Cooler temperatures have caused a delay in blooms compared to previous years, so the slow progress of the plants in the garden have had me worried. We’ve got lots of kangaroo paw plants, but none had started flowering until this morning, which was a disappointment as I had grown them from seed and wanted them to flourish considering the kangaroo connection. It’s hurting especially as plants in…

  • Garden The F**k Up!

    Unsure of where to put the punctuation in the title, I decided to go without any at all, and I used this phrase because I wanted to talk about the garden, have something catchy, and draw from the Velominati’s Rule Number Five. Our garden, Kangaeroo Corner* is absolutely thriving. But not quite in the way that I may have originally envisaged, hence the latter part of the title, and the uncertainty over where to place the punctuation.** Banksia I should originally have planted in sunny spots are doing well, but none of our four trees have never really flowered, which is what the sun will draw out of them. And…

  • Gifts Galore From The Garden And More

    Spring has really kicked into motion, one of the upshots being that our garden presents us with a new gift nearly every day. Our garden is providing us with a series of new flowers one after another. Hardenbergias have been giving me great delight for a few weeks now, particularly because I grew all of our four thriving plants from seeds I brought back from Australia. But our biggest surprise this year has come from the white paperbark teatree, which we picked up in a bargain basement bin at our local home center and have now been rewarded with a delightful bunch of frilly blossoms. Our ground covering linear-leaf grevillea,…

  • No Beg Pardon In Our Garden

    Our garden, Kangaeroo Corner (even though it’s not a corner), is unabashedly at its best in the spring, though it also thrives in places during the other seasons. Flowers are blooming now, bringing immense delight. Flowers I grew from seeds–hardenbergia and kangaroo paw now, a dwarf wattle that briefly flourished last year before I killed it through neglect, and hopefully some banksia–bring a special kind of joy. Having said that, the garden hasn’t provided the comprehensive delight it had brought at times in previous years. Part of the reason is that it hasn’t needed to. For the few years up until the summer of 2024 work wasn’t going exactly to…

  • Cherry Bomb!

    Cherry blossoms have started to bloom in Tokyo’s suburbs. For the most part, flowers have yet to reach peak bloom along my most-traversed part of the Tama River. But in some of the areas where the flowers are at their best, the view is lovely. It was a bonus to be able to see them in flower this morning as I had presumed the entire weekend to be a washout. It rained incessantly yesterday. It gave me time to do some much-needed study for work, which is paying me to take the course I’m doing. I should be putting in a bit more effort on my studies than I am….

  • Tokyo’s Wonderfully Whirled With Aus

    Walking around central Tokyo over a couple of days this week, I got to discover a pocket garden filled with Aussie plants, including blooming grevillea and kangaroo paw. This little circular garden created a wonderful whirled of Aus, right in the Marunouchi business district. Flowers weren’t the only wonderful sights of the city. Walking around gifted me plenty of wonderful sights to see.