The wind was ferocious yesterday, getting up to 60 kmh at times. But deep in the ravine on our trail walk though we could hear it roaring above in the outleafing canopy, it hardly made much of a stir in the forest interior. And that made for opportunities for mosquitoes to do their best to spoil the pleasure of our ravine ramble. Not that alone, but the extreme damp cold that prevailed under a laundry-grey sky and the rainfall of the last few days transforming some of the trails into pure muck, in some places deep with ample breeding pools for mosquitoes, no doubt teeming with larvae.

It was, despite all of that, a lovely ramble in the woods. Unexpectedly we came across the first of the Jacks, in a place we'd never seen any before. Although it's still early for Jack-in-the-Pulpits to thrust out of the soil and we've despite that looked for their presence in the usual places without reward, here was a little Jack greeting us.

We also saw yesterday the first blooms of wild strawberry, the wild apple trees are beginning to flower just as the Saskatoon berry (Serviceberry) tree flowers are waning and there were also a few red baneberries in flower. And then, something odd among the trilliums appeared to entertain us even more with the wonder of nature's diversities.

Among the usual scarlet trilliums (officially called purple trilliums) was a pair of pale pink-with-brown-blush trillium flowers. About a decade ago we'd once seen a Painted Lady trillium among the deep red that is the norm for our clay-based ravine, never to be seen again by us. On the rare occasion we've spotted white trilliums there, the common trillium of Ontario that constitutes its floral symbol. But further sightings elude us.

The pink that we saw yesterday also marked a first. Modest in size like the purple, with narrow, spear-like petals and downcast mien unlike the proud upright posture of the larger white blossoms, it wasn't an orphan but a beautiful anomaly.

There were clumps of yellow and of mauve violets galore. And now the foamflower is also in bloom. Lilies-of-the-Valley are there in abundance, mostly clustered around the ground surrounding tree trunks, but they've not yet flowered. And we also noted the presence of watercress in an area that is always seemingly damp.