Finally, and at last the days of spring discovery have arrived.

Wandering through our neighbourhood wooded ravine is like sauntering through a treasure-landscape of jewels, shyly revealing themselves with the arrival of more moderate temperatures, spring rain and strengthened sunrays.

These are, for the most part, fleeting treasures, present at precisely the time of year when the atmosphere is most gentle and the trees have not yet acquired their green mantle shielding the forest floor from the warming, life-generating rays of the sun whose kiss most flowers require to bloom.

In our ramble through the ravine yesterday, to our delight we saw the first Jacks-in-the-Pulpit beginning to emerge, an always-looked-forward-to event for us.

The old willow that had fallen straight across the creek, shattered at its base, its crown destroyed in the crash that ensued, still adamantly insists it has a right to live, and regularly sends up green shoots from its recumbent trunk, reaching for the sun.

We came across trout lilies, fungi, the first of the woodland violets, both yellow and mauve, Serviceberry beginning its evanescently-short bloom, the odd wild strawberry in bloom, trilliums, red baneberry, lilies-of-the-valley (not yet in bloom), horsetails (those unattractive, primitive plants used in the Medieval era in scriptoriums to erase the ink from vellum) and false Solomon's seal just beginning to take on its juvenile appearance.