Missouri Botanical Gardens

On Saturday, Ryan and I took a trip to St. Louis to go to the Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Unlike the gardens we went to outside of Charlotte, this garden is in the middle of the city, and was established before 1900. For being in an urban setting, it covers a remarkably large area of land. I was also surprised to see so many buildings scattered throughout. As with many botanical gardens, they had different kinds of gardens, such as a Japanese Garden and an English Garden.

The area I found most interesting, however, was a part of the gardens dedicated to the kind of vegetation most ordinary folks plant: vegetables, and flowers. They had a full vegetable garden there, complete with tomatoes, bell peppers, watermelons, etc.; and they had an area with the kind of flowers you can get at Lowes for your front yard: lantanas, hastas, etc. They even had a little section with 8 mailboxes or so, with different kinds of flower arrangements you could do around each. Although it seemed remarkably ordinary to have everyday plants in a formal garden, I appreciated the fact that they had made an attempt to help all of us non-gardeners out there know a little more about growing plants.

We were there to see the Japanese Festival, but there were so many people crowding around the main exhibits, we tended to stay away from the "festival" part of the garden, just to stay away from the throng. However, we did enjoy looking at some banzai plants, koi fish, and kimons and parasols for sale.

At the end of the day, I was worn out from walking around in the sun and heat for several hours, and I didn't feel like eating Japanese food in an outdoor tent, so we decided to go to a sit-down sushi restaurant to round out our Japanese day. I told Ryan I had seen a sign for a new sushi place in Fairview Heights that I thought we should check out. We had to laugh when we saw the sign in front:

I mean, who doesn't want to get sushi the same place they get their jewelry and handbags?

It turns out the place had only been open a month, but we had a very nice dinner to celebrate the Labor Day weekend.