Around my house

There are many hagwons (private schools) around Jeonju, which is known as "education city". There are two within "spitting" distance of my apartment. The yellow bus is one of a fleet that transports the students to and from school each day, to the school closest to my door.

The buses are extra ordinary. The competition between the hagwons is immense, so you see some pretty smart buses. The yellow line means that there can be no parking there, and the police do come around and issue fines for offenders.


The roses are on the fences along from the hagwon and the elementary school, which is opposite the hagwon. The roses are spectacular. Only a few weeks ago when I arrived they were brown sticks, that have burst into leaf and then the flowers came.


These wonderful leaves are part of a display covering a wall near the big golf driving range. I thought they made a lovely picture.

Flowers for the Teacher

I love fresh flowers, and while I had the opportunity to admire wonderful flowers in the florists around Jeonju but I'd never bought any.

On the night out with the students, two of them bought me flowers as it was "Teachers Day" the following day.

Howwonderful they are. Still blooming and sitting in water in the bamboo cup that I receive at the Bamboo Tea Restaurant a few weeks before.

The Rose Garden

Hard to see - but little "cuttings" of rose bushes.

Roses in bloom - two photos.

When we arrived here in February, at the end of winter, there was a garden bed near the foreign teachers apartment building that nothing but the soil (tragically bland almost rocky soil) with rows of "sticks" approximately 3 inches high.

For many days I passed this "garden" with little interest, but one day I had a closer look and realized that the little sticks were small rose plants. (I learned later that they had been planted a year or so before and already had had one flowering, and were pruned back severely.)

As spring approached the familiar reddish shoots appeared and over the next month or so the "little sticks" grew until they were about three feet tall with copious buds on them. Right now the roses are blooming - still many buds, and some spent flowers. They are a picture.

(The soil in which the amazing gardens grow here is rocky, and full of clay which clumps. It is surprising to me that they don't compost - and there are many resources here to create compost - to add to the soil to nourish it.)

Chinese Gardens about to burst forth in Spring bloom

This is the rose garden - with a few taller spikes of rose branches.

It is obvious that Spring is in the air. Only 3 days into the new season, the plants are sprouting buds. The garden here is tended with great care, and is quite amazing for a school. The gardeners appear to be older gentlemen who spend hours in the gardens, and at this time they would be anxiously looking at their handiwork.

I find some quite strange things that I have not been able to understand. Why, for example do some of the trees have rope neatly wound around their trunks?

In one garden – photo here – looks like a garden of rocks – in an undulating pattern. At first glance it looks like just rocks, but closer inspection shows rows and rows of rose bushes. They may well be miniature roses, but they are pruned so that few are more than two or three inches above the soil. I can see the thorns.

In the last couple of days I’ve seen the reddish brown of new shoots on the roses – and I anticipate a spectacular display in the next month or so. Other plants that I don’t recognize are also starting to sprout new buds.

Along one of the canals in the school grounds are weeping trees, looking a little like the weeping willows that I knew as a child in Adelaide. These too are sprouting and when in full leaf will make a beautiful framing of the canal.

Everywhere there is new growth on plants, and I look forward to taking photos of the blooms that result.

The view of the weeping trees beside the canal.