Herbarium bottles of cut surface are the highlight of the exhibit. You can have a close look at beautiful shapes and colors of fruits. (in Bando, Ibaraki Prefecture)
Shining artworks of an apple, a mandarin orange, and grapes which are ten times bigger than the original
IBARAKI, Dec. 16 – The Fruits World exhibit at the Ibaraki Nature Museum in Bando City, Ibaraki Prefecture, is now attracting a lot of attention as an event offering visitors a chance to enjoy and feel various shapes and scent of all kinds of fruits. There are more than 100 kinds of fruits on display, including local specialties such as chestnuts and melons showed in very unique exhibitions, for example, of cut surfaces as well as flower samples. Visitors can enjoy looking at the fruits from all different angles.
One of the features of the event is how you can look at the shapes of fruits. The biggest highlight is a display of cut fruit herbariums- slices of fruits dried and preserved in bottles filled with herbarium oil. There are 144 herbarium bottles each containing one of the 15 kinds of fruits including cherries, figs, lemons, and kiwi fruits. The bottles on the shelf are lit up from the back to make it easier for visitors to look closely at their colors, shapes and seeds and overall “design” of the fruits.
It also has an exhibit featuring the ecology of fruit trees that introduces origin and features of them by using 50 kinds of pressed flowers and branches as well as 100 types of fruits sampled in Japan and abroad. You can also experience the fragrance of fruits reproduced by a master perfumer.
At a fun photo-shooting spot for visitors, you can take a photo of yourself popping out of cut fruits.
The Fruits World is the 73th special exhibition for the museum. It collected 918 items with the cooperation of farmers, laboratories and agricultural cooperatives in Ibaraki and other prefectures for the display which began in October.
It combines a lot of fun exhibits and scientific contents. It also has a section dedicated to great works of Eiichi Kurosawa, a native of Ibaraki who discovered gibberellins, which are plant hormones necessary for growing everyone’s favorite seedless grapes.
According to a 42-year-old planner of the exhibit, Fumio Toshima, “What you see in supermarkets and on your dinner table are only part of the fruits. I want to everyone to learn a lot more about them and love them.” The exhibit will continue until January 27, 2019.