Well, there it is, summer and gardening are natural component constituents of a fully satisfying life. For us, it is a fail-safe formula, in any event, as I suspect it is for a great number of people, mostly mature people like us. The passion for gardening is all-enveloping and a great source of satisfaction in the actual work involved in preparing each new year's season of welcome garden renewal.

We love our daily garden rounds, inspecting the wealth of new appearances that tend to surprise and gratify us with their insistence that they too be part of the rich tapestry that takes our breath away each time we glance around and find ourselves looking out a window onto the garden, or moving about the house exterior and noticing something unusual in the presence of a garden 'gift', wondering where it came from and enjoying its presence among our prized plants.

We both love in particular the varied foliage, texture and colours of hostas, large and small, which attain such perfection of shape throughout the summer months, and even go to the trouble of offering us their floral tributes to summer on long, slender wands.

We love the heucheras that are so fecund that they reproduce themselves in miniature, growing between the cracks of our walkway pavers awaiting our attention so we may gently lift them and place them elsewhere, within one of the borders, to flaunt their beauty.

We love the coneflowers, the lilies, the geraniums and the pansies, the peonies and the roses, the asters and the astilbies, the black-eyed Susans and the bellflowers, the bergenia and the monarda, the bleeding hearts and the chrysanthemum, the columbines and the daisies, the delphiniums and the foxglove, the poppies and the mallow, the impatiens and the lobelia.

Above all, we just adore the brilliant-hued and soft-petalled begonias whose core we collect in the fall to store overwinter in the basement and bring back to vibrant flowering life in the spring.

And then there are the miniature 'gardens' that we plant as early in the spring as we can manage when danger of frost has finally passed, and which give us the joy of their perfection throughout summer.

The filled garden pots and urns that display themselves in blazing colour, form and texture, each a paean to nature's grand design.