Today we visited the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, the biggest garden of trees and flowers you'll ever get here. Since the day was nice and sunny we decided stop playing mahjong and go out for a little bit of fresh air like all the other healthy kids out there.

A little doggy came over to ask for directions. We didn't really know where he really wanted to go though. It was something along the lines of "my master's car"

Well, since the garden was so hueg, we decided to look at the map and see if there was anything interesting to see... Kagami wanted to see the ducks, so we went off to the nearby lake first.

I must say the ducks are a rowdy bunch.

They love fighting over ONE piece of breadcrumb, despite there being over9000 pieces thrown at them.

The Ahiru-chans are a lot calmer and swim round the lake at their own pace.

We saw some playing tag.

Now for an utterly pointless shot of Kagamin sitting on a tree stub for no apparent reason except to test my lens which was made dirty by ducks jumping up and down flapping their wings like mad ducks and making splashes everywhere.

We got to see some nice white flowers that grow on a tree.

That's the tree's name. Next time I see the flower I'll know to call it John.

The entrance to the Fern House was locked. Looks like we'll be coming back later to see it along with the roses. And yes, the roses haven't bloomed yet.

Kagami: Lookie! I'm 1.5 meters tall!
Me: I'm sure you are.

While walking through the garden, we came across the playground. So Kagamin got excited for some reason and hopped onto some random piece of abstract art. The playground has a lot of abstract art for children to play with. I'm not exactly sure why though...

This was the said piece of abstract art. It looks like a hippo with long legs.

In keeping to the theme of life, the botanical gardens playground also features a joke mini jurassic park. Those dinosaurs you see behind her are taller than me mind you.

If you ride a cow you're a cowgirl, but if you ride a dinosaur, you're a dinosaur girl?

This blog post was brought to you by the letter K.

Ooh a statue of a fern.

Kagami likes ferns. I guess its because they are nice to eat.

We also came across these mysteriously unnamed flowers.

That didn't stop Kagami from jumping round in them though.

We also found these funny looking plants called Roscoeas. They look like the miniature version of those bulbous plants found in many elven villages in fantasy games.

There were even these cool looking dandelion-like plants. No they aren't the type that trap animals. They are extremely small.

I was about to comment about "walking the pathways" when Kagamin reminded me that the Japanese do the same thing with English signs.

We found these flowers growing on a bridge. Thing is, they weren't named. It seemed that the more exciting flowers are mostly not named. Maybe its because they were so pretty people started ogling so much at them that they forgot to name them?

We found a little monument called the "bell of world peace"

It was an interesting place to hang a bell. What was even more interesting was that the words on it were written in Japanese and English.

The bell thing was surrounded by lots of flowers.

It turned out the flowers were called Cherry Blossoms. I was starting to wonder what sakura was then...

Turns out that there also were other flowers similarly named...

I was wondering if Grape, Orange, Durian or Banana Blossoms existed...

The Cherry Blossom thing still bothered me though, because the sakuras weren't called that.

River of the sky is an awesome name for flowers. I must remember this name. This was the name of the flowers whose tree Kagami was sitting in by the way.

Since the place was so huge, and it was getting cold, we decided to wander around a bit more just to see if we found anything interesting.

We found something that could have easily been the work of more rampaging artists.

Kagami seemed to like it though.

Time to go home...

Despite her smiling and stuff she looked pretty tired. I guess traversing such a large area is just too taxing for her little legs.

written by astrobunny \\ ahiru, bell, botanic, duck, fern, flower, garden, hanami, kagami, lucky, playground, sanpo, star