Now when we look out the glass of our front door toward the gardens at the front of our house, or through a window, our eyes are captured by bright areas of colour where none existed only a few days earlier.

It's taken several days of attention to what will be planted where to make certain that all of the urns, pots and other planters we have scattered around the gardens, front and back of our home are well endowed with the potential for summer splendour; a richness of form, texture and colour, and sometimes fragrance as well.

These are aspirational little scenes, the contents of each of these garden pots, representing gardens-in-miniature, hosting immature plants which will in time throughout the season grow to mature presence in the full glory of what they are capable of producing. The spare room in the soil of each of these pots will no longer be seen as the plants reach maturity and companionably share full space with one another.

It's always a challenge and never anything but pleasurable to pay homage to nature and the seasons by arranging annuals in a manner to complement the reliability in succession of our various perennials scattered throughout the gardens. The magnolia trees have begun shedding their blossoms, and in their place the ornamental crabs are in full regalia.

The scintillating beauty of the variety of blossoms and their shapes, their shades, give us enormous pleasure to behold. Our eyes sweep across the tight panorama of what constitutes our property, to glance from one area to another with the distinctive presence of each, and each delivers a gift of beauty.

This is a pleasure and an appreciation of nature's bounty in aesthetics so deep that my mind can get lost contemplating it all, and I feel I could just stand there and breathe it all in with the lens of my soul's aesthetic.

It resembles the pleasure in transcendent beauty that overcomes me when I rest before one of my husband's stained glass windows in various types of light situations and remain frozen in the clasp of the richness that confronts me.