cherry blossom time

The wonder | wander | women have definitely watched too many Japanese films. We've seen many historical sword battles or the slow grieving process of a family losing a loved one. Meanwhile in every film, cherry trees (or sakura) in full bloom shed petals like tears in the background, reminding us about the transient beauty of human life.

Japanese folk stories even add a touch of horror to the beauty of the sakura, suggesting that blood from a human sacrifice will give the petals a more vivid, attractive pink.

We often miss the bright tropical blooms of our home, but once a year we binge on a different kind of flower-gazing, visiting as many sakura trees as we can.

They appear randomly on street corners as well as in parks and gardens. The rest of the year they're perfectly ordinary trees, but come April they reveal themselves in layers and layers of eye-catching pink.

Japanese people celebrate the beginning of spring with the hanami or cherry blossom festival, trooping in hundreds to parks all over the country. They sit under the pink fluttering canopies and share food, tea and sake with friends and family as the petals fall.

Our local trees are too far apart, so we contrive a version of hanami by taking a frenzy of pictures, trying to capture the fragile flowers from as many angles as possible.

Or we collect fallen blossoms to press them in the pages of our notebooks.

It gets to be a bit of an obsession...we even have sakura-pink pens and sakura-pink ink!

It's a way to keep the memories of our favourite flowers bright and fresh as April, the whole year round.