Yesterday when we called they said, yes, their begonias were ready. They are by no means the only flowering plants we're interested in, but the quality of the begonias, and their very competitive price, has ensured we continue returning to the Cleroux nurseries year after year for the annuals we plant in our plethora of garden pots and urns.

While there we chose the begonias we required in all the colours that so entrance us in those gorgeous flowers. We also picked up bacopa, million bells, marigolds, portulaca, petunias, impatiens, vinca, phlox and geraniums. Just managing to fit all of them into the capacious trunk of the car, and on the back seat, before driving back home with our treasures. None of which can be planted until perhaps next week; they will be stored in the garden shed until then.

The very hot dry weather we'd experienced for the last week has gone. In its place we've had plenty of rain, which we most certainly need, to help the perennials in the garden (let alone on a universal, macro scale in the environment) begin their ascent into summer and a cooling of the atmosphere that seems more like a return to early spring than the mid-spring temperatures we'd prefer to enjoy. Because it has become so cool, there is always the danger of nighttime frost.

We do shop elsewhere as well, at other area nurseries, but it's at the Cleroux nurseries that we obtain most of the excellent stock that we use, year after year. I do keep the begonia bulbs over, year after year as well, storing them in the basement of our house throughout the winter months, and in late April many of them have already begun sprouting, helped along by the spring sun shining through the basement windows, and being sprinkled several times weekly with a water mist. Those are the bulbs that I usually plant in the waiting pots in the backyard and throughout the gardens.

"Where's your other dog?" she asked. Amazing, really, considering that she sees us only once a year, and has thousands of people thronging to pick up her superior grade plants every spring. We explained the absence of our little black poodle, and her eyes pooled. We asked in turn where the remaining little Shih Tsu was, that she had of the pair we had originally met when we first began shopping there. We knew that one of them had gone several years earlier. Its companion was lost to death over the winter.

Her son, a robust middle-aged man, described to us that while he was on a trip to Toronto he had a call from his mother informing him that she was taking their remaining dog to the veterinarian that day, to be put down. He was baffled and perturbed, begged her to wait, he would be home directly. When he'd left, he said, the little dog seemed just fine, and he couldn't imagine why his mother had decided to take such precipitate action to remove their beloved remaining pet from life. But when he arrived home he was dumbstruck to see what had happened to the little thing in his several days' absence; her health had suddenly collapsed and she could barely stand, her bones seeming to stick out everywhere.

They both stood there before us, eyes clouded with the memory of their loss, inconsolable with the pain of it, and we knew we had met the match of our desolate feelings of loss over our long-time companion, Button.