Botanical Gardens

It's our 15th wedding anniversary today!  Whoo-hoo!  Fortunately Stevie was post-call today and so we were able to spend the day together.  He says that he threatened the nurses with deployment to Afghanistan if they woke him during the night last night for anything other than an emergency, and fortunately they heeded to his threats.

So we headed off this morning to the Southeast Botanical Gardens to take a look at the tropical flowers and a stroll around the gardens.  Mom and I went to the botanical gardens last October and found a large pond covered in seed pods from lotus flowers. 

They were fascinating in themselves, but I really wanted to see what the pond looked like full of lotus flowers.  Well, June is lotus flowering season in Okinawa and they were impressive!  Huge leaves sat about 3 feet off the water and projecting up from them were two foot stems supporting huge lotus flowers.  They are very beautiful flowers and very photogenic.

Another fun spot in the gardens is the fish pond where massive quantities of carp swim in wait to beg for food.  They high-tail it across the pond the minute you step to the edge in great anticipation of any dropped morsels.

There were all kinds of interesting tropical flowers although most didn't have English signs so their true type kept us guessing.

Relaxing in the hammocks!

Emmy on the "cowch"