The fake plants in Tokyo were nearly as nice as the cherry blossoms. . .
The last pic is the best of both worlds, fake cherry blossoms.
Category: fake plants
At the end of our trip to Japan we made a quick stop at the Kenrokuen Garden, one of the few places on the planet that successfully combines all six elements of excellent gardens as defined in the classic Chinese text, Rakuyo-Meienki: spaciousness, seclusion, watercourses, antiquity, panoramas, and artifice. Yep, artifice.
From the pamphlet, artifice was defined as, “Ponds, streams, famous trees, mountain views integrated with the garden, a valley in the mountains that suddenly appears, etc. all considered and created by human skills. Other types of human skills are the skills of Kenrokuen’s gardeners, who have been caring for the garden for a long time, refining its beauty while making use of techniques passed down from generation to generation. . .”
Then I spotted them, the gardeners, the great masters of fake nature. I bowed in respect.
Coles, a large grocery chain, is jumping on the de-colonializing band wagon, sort of? They don’t mention any specific tribes, nor place names. And something’s off with the phrase, “traditional custodians.” This makes the aboriginals sound like groundskeepers hired to keep the place tidy before their betters arrived.
On the plus side, lovely fake ferns!
Spotted some fake flowers in Hamilton. According to Floral Image’s website, “Fresh is not always best. Over an average 5 year lifespan, Floral Image lifelike flower arrangements are 80x better for the environment.”
Now this is sort of forward thinking we need. Way to go NZ! Any day now I expect a study that says fake humans are 80x better than fresh ones.
maybe I’m weird, but sometimes I enjoy the airports just as much as the destinations. . .
Even a fake-nature photographer knows that it’s fun to shoot tall skinny trees from a worm’s eye view. The tree on the left is a real ponderosa pine that I shot a few months back at Mt. Lemmon. And the one on the right is a fake pine tree in the Seoul airport. Pretty awesome, Korea!
I had never been to a Rainforest Cafe, but while walking through the Arizona Mills mall, I realized that the restaurant filled an entire bingo card of topics for my website. Fake nature, wildvertising, greenwashing, crapitalism, vaguely apocalyptic. . . all in the same place? Wuh? So my wife and I braved the lush plastic jungle and now I’m convinced. . . Rainforest Cafe is a portal to hell.
At one time there were almost sixty Rainforest Cafes. Now there are sixteen? The one in Tempe is vaguely apocalyptic. The fish tanks are cloudy and contain no fish. The plastic vines are faded and dusty. Many of the animatronics only half work. One of the gorillas kept twitching and giving Nazi salutes. And the menu is full of food that you’d only order when drunk at 2AM at Denny’s.
It felt weird having animatronic elephants and gorillas watching me eat. I kept waiting for them to say things like, “are you gonna eat that?” and “please pass the ketchup.”
The motto of Rainforest Cafe was A WILD PLACE TO SHOP AND EAT. No argument there. The gift shop was bigger than the restaurant. While waiting for our drinks, I came up with some other mottos:
- UMBERTO ECOLOGY
- SAVE THE
RAINFORESTNINETIES - A PORTAL TO HELL