I moved recently. For the last two and a half years, I lived in a second floor apartment with a sunroom but no balcony. It was a studio apartment, meaning it was one room and rather tight. I was okay with this. I don’t need a lot of space, and since I moved from America, it’s not like I had a lot of stuff that needed space to fill. One disappointment about my apartment, however, was the lack of any outdoor space where I could have a flower bed or box or something. My house in Seattle had a rather big yard with flower beds filled with perennials we did nothing to care for, yet they flourished regardless haha. We planted very hardy flowers in there. We also had a grassy yard, quite a few big bushes that would flower in spring, a crab apple tree that flowered in spring, a cherry tree that flowered in spring, and an evergreen that absolutely did not flower but I adored it regardless. Suffice it to say that flowers were a big part of my home life, even if I wasn’t an avid gardener.

There’s a lot less greenery and green space in general around my home in Ogaki. Isolated houses will have little gardens, but they’re usually relegated to small pots or hidden behind fences. The parks are numerous and quite lovely, but they’re rather small and often crowded. I’ve missed having my own green space where I could relax and enjoy a variety of flowers.

My new apartment has a covered patio with a couple small flower boxes. The soil in the boxes is in pretty poor shape, but they get decent sun and rain. It makes me want to get a bag of soil and flower seeds and make myself a green space on my patio. Currently, when I look outside that window, all I see is a carpark. That’s not pretty. Certainly not as relaxing as plants and especially flowers. I’d like to rehabilitate those flower boxes and make myself some at-home green space to enjoy. That will be my next moving in project. I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully, I can get some hardy perennials like back home.

Since I haven’t actually accomplished this task yet, I don’t have any pictures of my flower children. I do have lots of pictures of the flowers around my Seattle neighborhood, though. We, too, had a rose bush for awhile but it died in a wind storm, so these are my neighbors’ roses. Looking at them makes me happy. Hopefully, I’ll have equally happy flowers at home soon, too.