I must have overexerted myself yesterday with the cherry blossoms at the old Imperial Palace, because my cold seems to be getting worse again today. Sigh.

Anthony started his final year of preschool earlier this week, comparable to kindergarten in The States. Dropping him off on the first day, I noticed a beautiful tree lush with deep pink blossoms of some sort....

However, upon close inspection, it turned out that the day of rain Kyoto had just after full bloom in my area had left the blossoms on this tree looking downright ratty...

However, the carpet of rain-flattened blossoms did look nice in its pink lushness....

I'd brought my camera along to see whether I might find anything interesting on the ride back home, but the weather didn't make it very productive. There were no clouds, but there was also no sky. It was just a very blotchy, indistinct haze that was usually so heavy that you could comfortably stare at the sun.

But the haze sort of thinned for a bit, which made this shot of some of the blossoms along the Takano river a bit nicer. The blossoms run up and down this and the Kamo river for miles; this particular location is about a mile an a half north of my place.

Unrelated to the above, but still botanical, here is a shot of a ginkgo tree along Higashioji Street. The city strips these trees bare in the fall so that they don't have to clean up the prodigious amount of yellow leaves they would otherwise shed (see the first picture on this post)), and as you can see here, this tree has woken up from winter's nap and started growing again...

However, the odd thing is that it's quite isolated; all its compatriots are still utterly bare; here's the tree right next to it....

Actually, I guess it's awake because all the thin shoots have grown, but they're all quite far behind the one early-riser.

(Clearly, my cold has left me without the energy to create an interesting post. Sorry.)

Continued here...