Compelled by a tradition of our personal making, one just incidentally shared by much of Canadian gardeners in general, we made the trek to our favourite gardening centre. It sits on a hilly knoll overlooking a highway on one side, country road on another, an old farm which we discovered as a reliable venue where we're able to procure the most mature, healthiest floral stock for annual planting in the area. We've been returning to the site, called Cleroux Gardens for well over a decade, since the closure of our once-favourite gardening vendors, White Rose Nurseries.

We've gained a bit of an intimate knowledge of the life of the proprietress of the Cleroux Gardens over the years, through an exchange of pleasantries that eventually opened up to personal revelations, in the most natural of ways; people taking an human-interest in one another.

Much has changed in the personal life of the owner since we first met, but the fundamentals of her garden enterprise has not; reliability, prime garden offerings, advice when requested, and preferential pricing. It's a joy to pass through the rows of greenhouses stocked with hanging baskets in colourful, fragrant array, the greenhouse floors and tables loaded with beautiful plants that gardeners hunger after, particularly at this time of year when they envision their gardens for the coming year reflecting the Paradise of their souls' yearnings.

So we went through the various rows of offerings and made our mutually-agreed-upon selections. They are meant mostly for all the various garden pots and planters we maintain around our house. Which meant we needed geraniums in their various blaze of colours, begonias, our most favourite of summer-flowering plants, dracaena, to centre the pots, lobelia and trailing vines to complement the larger plants, and a variety of odds and ends. Unlike in other years when we were challenged to load everything into the trunk of a car, this time there was no shortage of room in my husband's little red truck box.

Now, all that's left to be done is the actual planting. With which I plan to proceed this day. This will not be the end of the accumulation of summer flowering plants, but it does form the basis of what we plan to enjoy throughout the summer and fall months.