King’s Park, a large botanical gardens in my city, has just installed a little japanese garden and in celebration of this (as it is the middle of the wildflower season) they are hosting Hanamatsuri, the flower festival.

This morning Mira, Clara and I cooked up a japanese picnic and dressed in our kimono and yukata before heading off to the park. We met some friends there and enjoyed a lovely little picnic with katsu chicken, oyakudon, tempura, usyaki tamago, meatballs, teriyaki tofu, octopus frankfurts, salad and fruit! Mirai made baby radishes in to the cutest little toadstool shapes and clara mad an apple to match! I cut carrots up to look like sakura flowers and added them to the salad, it was a real feast!

After lunch we went to see the Ikebana demonstration, the artist was amazingly talented! My favourite of her works was a simple construction of three lilies, though they were all very beautiful! I would love to learn Ikebana some day. There was also origami and martial arts demonstrations, and kite flying!

Eugene was kind enough to take some photos of us by the japanese garden. It was fun dressing up as a japanese Princess for a day, though my kimono is very plain I like it because it is the colour of autumn leaves I really want a summer yukata now though!