Kite and Pinata Festival at Springfield Botanical Gardens
/Last weekend the Springfield Botanical Gardens hosted a festival along with sister cities in Mexico and Japan – a Kite and Pinata Festival. It was well attended. There were people directing traffic into the garden when we got there, and we were pleased that we found a good parking place. There were already kites in the air! It was a sunny breezy day, perfect weather for the event.
There were food trucks and vendors. My daughter and I shared an anpan (a Japanese sweet roll filled with red bean paste)…tasty. I bought some Japanese earrings as well.
I noticed a new sculpture near the visitor center and took a picture of the butterfly part of it.
We walked around enough to notice the tulips were still blooming and couldn’t resist photographing them. I like the ones that are multi-colored. The ones with more than the usual petals seemed to be popular this year. I liked the yellow tulips with splashes of red/orange the best.
There was a dogwood in bloom. The wind made it challenging to photograph the blooms. I used the zoom; the light was so bright that the shutter speed was short enough to freeze the moving flowers!
There was a small stage where Mexican and Japanese themed performances were featured. The teenage girls performed well with mariachi band even in the wind…their colorful skirts attached to their wrists to keep them more controlled than the cowgirl dancers that kept loosing their hats.
Back at the visitor center, I checked their collection of hens and chicks. The colonies have survived the winter, and their colors are probably more vivid because of the cold.
We walked back to our car via the white garden and hosta garden.
I noticed the dragonfly mosaic is missing some pieces. I hope it will be repaired.
It was a great way to spend a Saturday morning. We opted to go to a restaurant for lunch because the wind, great for kites, was a bit gusty for eating outside.
