I stopped by the Imperial Household Agency office today at the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park (京都御所) to make a reservation to visit the Katsura Palace next month, and brought along my camera in case anything was blooming.

There are a lot of cherry trees in the park, but I think they're just budding so far. The blossoms are peach or, perhaps in some case, plum like those we sat the other day in “Plum Blossoms in Full Bloom at Kyoto’s Kitano Tenmangu Shrine”.

I knew it was going to rain and so was better prepared than my last outing which ended in me getting absolutely soaked during a 20-minute ride home on my scooter without rain gear. This time my preparation was simply knowing it was coming and leaving the moment it started. (At least that was the plan.)

So knowing I didn't have much time, I just pushed my scooter in the park sort of aimlessly, stopping now and again for pictures.

I'm going to guess these are Cherry...

The varieties never cease to amaze me.

These buds, of whatever kind of tree, were huge...

I eventually came to a nice area that will be teeming with thick crowds in a couple of weeks, but rain aside, it was absolutely delightful today.

This orchard is where I got the most delightful shots in last year's “Cliché Incarnate: Lame Formulaic Pictures of Plum Blossoms and Those Enjoying Them”. The title is a joke about a conversation I had that led me there (explained on that page), though I had apparently not noticed the “Peach Orchard” sign last time.

I had the place mostly to myself, but a few folks wandered in and out...

I went in and did the same myself...

In one sense it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but I put a lot of thought into blossom selection and composition... what's the background like, the lighting, the overall balance. That last one above fails on some basic composition levels, but of the millions of blossoms around, it was the only one I noticed with the subtle pink in the petals. It was at a really odd angle, with lots of branches in the way, so it was a challenge to get even this shot, which is perhaps why I like it more than it deserves.

Not everything had a bright future... these blossoms, whatever they were, were well past their prime....

I normally put the not-weather-sealed Voigtländer away at the first sign of rain, but every time I did I felt the need to pull it out for “just one last shot” almost right away. Pushing along a path toward the exit, I came across yet another kind of blossom that was, at the risk of overusing the word today, just delightful....

Some areas had more than just a smattering of blossoms...