Look what's blooming around you! 👹🍣🎎 Wonderful Japan

Even though many people may repeatedly claim otherwise, but our world is truly beautiful! As soon as you leave your own house and take a look around outside in nature, even the last skeptic and pessimist should realize that, given all the many colorful scenes you encounter there. But if you just curl up on your sofa and complain about your own suffering and the impending doom of civilization, you will of course miss out on most of this beauty.

Fortunately, my sofa is far too uncomfortable for me to really get cozy there. That's why I prefer to close the front door behind me and enjoy walking through our world with my eyes open, letting myself be surprised by what I find there.

And so it happened that some time ago we went on a hike that took us to a mountain right on the coast of the Japanese Sea. During this hike, in addition to the bright blue sky and the fresh green of the trees and bushes, I discovered a lot of other colors that helped to made my good mood even better.

It all started with these orange flowers, which clearly belong to a lily. They are probably the Japanese lily species “Lilium maculatum,” which can reach heights of 30 to 100 centimeters. Here, right on the coast, they were rather small, but their bright flowers were a wonderful sign of welcome.

Next, we discovered these bright purple flowers, which were impossible to miss.

They probably belong to the Carduus family, the thistles, and we encountered them repeatedly on our little hike, as they seem to feel quite at home here on the mountainside.

Just like these little blossoms, which were also purple, but a little lighter in color and smaller.

This should be a type of leek, more specifically Allium senescens, also known as mountain leek. If you looked closely, you could already spot it in the very first photo, and these flowers were probably the ones we saw most often.

Here they grow directly on meadow facing the coast, and plants of similar shape and size can also be found and admired in many other parts of the world.

Now it's turning a little yellow, and we're looking at a variety of stonecrop, which belongs to the scientific group of Sedum plants. It's probably the Japanese representative of this wide species, which also found a home here on this mountain side.

These bright flowers are likely to be Trachelospermum asiaticum, Japanese star jasmine, which was first described in 1846.

The Star jasmine is native to large parts of Asia and prefers mountainous forests and scrubland.

When I saw these red flowers, I first thought they were azaleas, but later I managed to identify them more accurately, learning something new in the process. These are rhododendron bushes, which are often confused with azaleas.

Actually, all azaleas are rhododendrons, but not all rhododendrons are azaleas. The latter bloom in spring, and since it was already summer, it was probably a type of rhododendron, which is also called Japanese alpine rose. I think that's a very fitting name.

And once again, there is something purple to feast your eyes on. Here we are dealing with a type of columbine that is mainly found in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere and, as we can see here, has also made its way to Japan.

This is likely Rosa multiflora a plant species within the large rose family. It originates from East Asia and is a broad-growing shrub that reaches heights of up to 3 meters and can also climb up to 5 meters high. It is sometimes called the Japanese rose and, unlike the more familiar rose species, has few to no thorns.

Here we see Viburnum dilatatum, which is native to East Asia. The plant genus Viburnum belongs to the musk family. Depending on the classification, there are between 100 and 200 species, most of which are found in the temperate to subtropical regions of the northern hemisphere. Varieties of some species and hybrids are popular as ornamental plants in parks and gardens.

And once again we got a little purple, this color seems to be extremely popular here on the mountain. What we see is Prunella vulgaris L., the common self-heal, which has spread mainly in the northern hemisphere. Although it had almost finished blooming, it was still a small bright highlight on our way back down the mountain.

And when we arrived back at our starting point and walked over the beach, we discovered a few more flowers. The goat's foot morning glory (Ipomoea pes-caprae), also known as beach morning glory, is a plant species from the big morning glory family. It can be found on tropical beaches and shores around the world and has also spread here in Japan, which is why I have encountered it quite often.

As we could see, there is always something to explore and admire, especially in nature. Since I am more of a layman than an expert in botany, I like to use the internet for help, and the website https://identify.plantnet.org/ has been very helpful in identifying and classifying the different plant species.

Of course, I may have made a mistake or two in this regard, and I am happy to be corrected. I won't be able to remember all the different plant names anyway, but I did learn a little while writing this blog article. And that's what matters in the end...