Japanese Garden Part II

Most journeys start with a path, whether you make your own or follow one make by someone else. I'm thinking about doing a book about paths since I have so many photos of them.


Most of the photos here are detail shots of things that caught my eye with commentary on why I took the shot.

Clicking on the photos will open up larger images if you want to see more detail.


If you're joining this journey with Part II I'll give you a brief background for the shoot (if you saw Part I you can just skip this paragraph). In late May the Japanese Garden in the Sepulveda basin invited photographers and painters to come in for a few hours and take pictures/paint without the distraction of the general public wandering around. These photos (and the ones from Part I, which is about the wildlife I encountered there) are the result of that event.

This was just the perfect composition with the bridge, the tree and is reflection.

So many lily pads and flowers it was hard to choose which one to shoot. I liked this one hiding a little within the green.

There are so many interesting things about the water plants. This one looked like a bowl and I love the serrated edges. On the ones where they were laying flat the surface tension sculpted the water into pointy bits.

I was saddened that so much of the vegetation there seemed to be in distress - dead trees, blackened or otherwise infected lily pads. I think the plants there are not doing well.

Bamboo fountain. The water collects in the bottom one until it fills up and tips down to spill into the gravel below. Kind of mesmerizing.

As much as the garden is about plants, it's also about structures. This is the underside of the bridge that goes from the garden, across the maintenance access road to a platform overlooking the water treatment plant next door.

This is the only color of bougainvillea I ever saw until I went to Hawaii in the 80's and discovered that it actually has many colors - orange, yellow, pink, red.

Of course there is a lot of water in the garden - rivers and a lake. The "milky" look is from shooting moving water at a very slow shutter speed.

View from inside the tea house. That view could easily be a painting on a wall. I especially like the juxtaposition of the flowing willow tree against the straight lines of the tea house wall.

Surprising splashes of red in a sea of green lawns and trees. I believe this is Japanese Maple. I could be wrong, I don't know a lot about trees, but that's what I'm guessing from the color and the shape of the leaves.

Another splash of red. This is an Ornamental Plum tree. I love these trees! In the morning when I got to the gardens it was completely overcast and the leaves on these trees looked black. I had to look closely at them to make sure they were still alive. When the sun came out a couple of hours later the red became very visible.

I have no idea what kind of plant this is, but it reminded me of Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors". The ropy parts are actually part of the plant, not just trash left behind. This is one of those things that is much more interesting in person than in a photo.

I liked this for the different textures - water, wood, stones. I actually had to lay on my stomach in the grass on the other side of the lake to get this shot.

So many things in this picture that I like - the delicate, lace-like plants on the surface of the water with the lily stems coming up through it and the angular reflection of the plants. There's also the edge of a wooden box frame just under the surface of the water.

So, these a just a few of the hundreds of photos I took that day. I hope you enjoyed them. Please feel free to leave comments below. If you want to get email notification when I put up future posts you can enter your email address in the box just above the post.