Finally, it's that cherished time in the garden. When, after breakfast, we can roam about while the sun filters through the trees onto the garden, illuminating colour, shape and texture, and the fragrance of lilacs and peonies permeates the air.

Our little poodles Jack and Jill appreciate the opportunity to linger in our wake, but their appreciation is limited to the freedom to dig up holus-bolus violets growing at the fringes of the garden beds. Violets appear to them to be delightful treasures, not to appreciate visually, but to eat, roots, stems and foliage. They have always done this, and are extraordinarily skilled in twisting the entire little plant out of the garden soil. We've given up attempting to restrain them. Violets are expendable.

It's the other plants in the garden that take our attention; the climbing roses now in bloom, the peonies in the full grace of their extraordinary beauty. The Icelandic poppies and the cranesbill geraniums, along with the bright blue and extremely structured flowers of the colonies of cornflower. Even Canterbury bells are beginning their bloom and rose mallow isn't far behind.

Strolling at casual leisure through it all, we take huge pleasure in the sights before us. The colourful arrays of the annuals plumped into our many garden urns and pots, stationed here and there to catch the eye, with geraniums and begonias their central features, flowering non-stop.

The bearded irises are just starting to fade, even as the lilies-of-the-valley, columbine and Bleeding Heart also have. In their place day lilies and oriental lilies are sending up their floral stems. Ladies mantle is proliferating in the rock garden, as is the bright red heuchera and various types of hostas, all of them generous in producing offshoots ready to be transplanted anywhere the notion takes us.

And in these morning observations of the thriving garden, any time a space is observed, it cries out for a juvenile hosta or heuchera offshoot to find a home there, and I am only too happy to oblige.