Well, at least the first that I've noticed. Returning from a trip to the store around 2pm, I noticed a few blossoms on the trees near my place. It's just in time, too, because as I noted in the last couple of posts, the plum blossoms have started to wane. So, I grabbed a few snapshots of them, and even turned a couple of ones with blue sky in the background into desktop backgrounds....

Using the time-lapse sequence I made last year as a guide, it seems that these trees have started to bloom about one day earlier than last [...]

Since we still don't have any cherry blossoms yet, at least in my part of Kyoto (although the first ones should start popping out soon), I'll finish up with the pics from yesterday's trip to see what remains of the plum blossoms at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine.

Yesterday's pictures were from the free areas of the shrine. It costs 600 yen (about six bucks) to visit the gardens, although that includes a bit of plum tea and some crackers. The garden has two parts, a lower part split by a little stream, and an upper plum orchard.

The trees were [...]

Earlier I posted a few preview pics of late-blooming "bundle-of-tissues" blossoms, and of plum blossoms, so today I'm posting a few pics of Kyoto's run-of-the-mill "cherry blossom" blossoms.

These first three pictures were taken a year ago by hooking up a bunch of extension tubes between the camera and my big Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom. I didn't yet have my good tripod, so this big, heavy combination on my previous (tiny, flimsy) tripod made for a comical view.

The three pictures above are fairly so-so – nothing special – but I've included them here to delay you a bit so [...]

In the last week or two I've started to notice some early blossoms around town. As far as I know, plum are the earliest, so that's what I assume they are. They tend to have much deeper, richer colors than cherry blossoms, and so can be more striking in one sense, but also more concrete and mortal in another. (Cherry blossoms, on the other hand, when experienced first hand, definitely lean toward "intangible" and "ethereal".)

Last year I posted my first blossom pictures on Valentine's day. It seems that this year I've had a cold pretty much straight since then, [...]

Being March already, I thought I'd look forward to Kyoto's cherry-blossom season, which should be ramping up in to full swing in a month or so. The orange blur in the background of the picture above is the Snowy Bridge from a post week ago. Photos in that post were looking down the canal toward where today's photo was taken.

The photos in today's post, of course, were not taken today; they were taken in late April last year after most cherry blossoms in this area were long gone. The blossoms here are of a late-blooming variety that appeared on [...]