Tottori Flower Park

Last Sunday we went for a little day out to the Tottori Flower Park, which means that I can now bore you with endless pictures of K and of flowers. I will try to be restrained...

The park was the largest flower park in Japan when it opened 11 years ago. It covers about 50 hectares, equivalent to about 11 Tokyo Domes - large areas in Japan always seem to be measured in Tokyo Domes! At the centre of the park is a heated dome housing tropical plants...

... and around the main area runs a covered walkway, about a kilometre in length. The walkway is level but the park is not, so that sometimes you are at ground-level and other times you are in the tree-tops.

We took a picnic lunch and ate it at the top of the Flower Hill, with lovely views of Mount Daisen, now completely free of snow. The Flower Hill is replanted throughout the year so that it is always full of one particular flower in bloom, and at the moment it is a mass of poppies...

Until K was born I'd only been to the Flower Park a couple of times, but in the last 2 years I think we've been four times. It's not far from home, not expensive and is not usually very busy; it has lots of space for little ones to run around safely and nice areas to picnic on, oh, and there are lots of lovely flowers!

Our timing wasn't great on this visit though. Saturday marked the start of their Rose Festival but, due to a colder than usual season, there weren't many roses in flower yet. The previous big attraction, the tulips, had pretty much finished so overall there were not as many flowers as I'd hoped.

There were lots of flowers in the dome though, and in the Floating Garden. The spaces between the walkways and flower beds are filled with water, with lots of big koi swimming around...

K's favourite part was probably watching the Flower Trains - actually little tractors disguised as locomotives pulling carriages for tours of the park. There are two running around the park all day, so every half hour or so K would announce 'Choo choo!'...

Outside of the ticket gates, on the way back to the car park, there is a shop selling local produce where H spotted rhubarb! I've never seen it in the supermarkets here and a lot of Japanese people seem to have never even heard of it. I snapped some up and made a crumble on Sunday night. H wasn't too keen but I wasn't offended - all the more for me :-)