Sakura Matsuri in Booklyn

I’m writing this in true New York style: outside, lying on the grass. Where the English were early cell phone adopters, the Americans felt the same way about laptops and for many under 40s their laptop has become just another limb. In a city of shoebox apartments, it’s perfectly normal here to see people escaping outside to work propped up against trees by the river or typing lying on their tummies in Central Park..Me, I’m hidden away behind a yew fence in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in a grove of silver birches, where the grass is sprinkled with violets and cherry blossom petals land on my keyboard every couple of seconds. It’s a perfect late spring day. I’m in a silk sundress and my feet are bare so I can wiggle my toes in the long grass and pretend that the City is a million miles away. I can hear the low throb of a generator and shrieking children as they run amok through the cherry blossom orchard and dance to the Japanese music performances that are part of this weekend’s Sakura Matsuri or cherry blossom festival here at the GardensIn fact it’s Japanese culture a go go in Brooklyn today. The Brooklyn Art Museum is still showing its Murakami exhibit, transplanted from LA and there were kimono clad women and harajuku girls mingling with the pot bellied Mid Westerners and Williamsburg hipsters, as they took in Murakami’s barmy cartoon world before wandering down the road for numerous photo ops here under the flowering cherries. Images: Yet more somewhat dodgy pics courtesy of my cameraphone.