Kochia Hill

The scrubby little kochia plants,

otherwise known as summer cypress, are not much to look at for most of the year, but at the end of the wet season they take on an extraordinary brilliant red color, lending them the name “Burning bush.”

In Hitachinaka City at the Hitachi Seaside Park, a vast stretch of rolling hills is jam-packed with the vivid crimson bushes that sway with the breeze, with whimsical Oz-like roads winding throughout. Outside of the park, kochia is more often gathered for the more mundane purpose of making brooms, but the park takes advantage of how spectacular it can be when planted in such abundance.

The park’s gentle slopes are full of flowering plants year round, often in enormous, monochromatic displays, and is also famous for its blue nemophilas, flowers with transparent blue petals. Overlooking it all is a looming ferris wheel.