Matsue English Garden, Part 1 x Lazy Blog.

This post was written in 2007. Some information may be out of date.

The biggest problem with country life is that there’s not much to do on weekends. Of course, you can always find things to do, and I’ve always had a real knack for making work for myself -_-; so it’s not like my weekends are exactly idle. There’s laundry, cleaning, studying, exercise… and lately I’ve even started learning to cook. Honestly, two of me wouldn’t be enough. The real problem is there’s nothing to refresh a mind worn out by the packed weekday routine. Escaping boredom is surprisingly hard in the countryside, where nothing much ever happens… I’ve already been to just about every hot spring in the area. -_-;;

So lately I’ve been revisiting places I’d skipped because I figured they wouldn’t be much good. One of them is the Matsue English Garden, a British-style garden. It used to be the Louis C. Tiffany Garden Museum, but the company running it pulled out, so Matsue City took it over and now runs it free of charge. Admission used to be a whopping 2,000 yen, so I never had any intention of going, but once I heard it was free I figured I’d give it a visit.

Fountain in the conservatory

Maybe because the whole concept is a garden, the indoor space is a conservatory.

Café terrace overlooking Lake Shinji

Nice weather. There were a few families around. Even though it’s free, it didn’t seem like many people come.

Fountain and the chapel bell tower

It had a slightly Harry Potter-ish feel to it.

Flowers 1

Everything was really well tended.

Flowers 2

Herbs 1

There were quite a lot of herbs. Rosemary, mint and so on… a garden full of fragrance. It feels very different from a Japanese garden. For a moment I was tempted to dig up a few herbs and take them home to cook with.

Flowers 3