Time will tell, it always does. I'll have to wait until next spring to discover by the visual evidence of trout lilies and white trilliums whether my having transferred, this early spring, small specimens of each of those spring-flowering wildflowers into our garden has succeeded. They looked promising shortly after having been transplanted to our garden, but as spring wore on the other garden residents took over eventually, engulfing whatever might have been left to the eye to discern of the receding trout lilies and white trilliums.

Time informed me on a much earlier occasion that my transplantation efforts of a dozen years and more years of purple trilliums and Jack-in-the-Pulpits had succeeded. Both, in fact, have overwhelmed my expectations. They've acclimated themselves and spread nicely, and the Jacks in particular have grown spectacularly gigantic, barely resembling those that were carefully dug out of the ravine to join our garden membership.

My brother, an academic botanist devoted to ecology and the preservation of natural resources had nothing but native species in his own garden in Halifax. He used to verbally compete with me, claiming that his Jacks were larger than ours. He'd seen our Jacks on visits with us, and though I hadn't seen his garden, I took his word for his claims. Had his been larger than ours they would have been monstrous in size.

And the thing about our Jacks is that they don't seem, over the summer months, to decline in the garden as they do out in their natural surroundings. They remain as large and as green and as visibly present throughout the summer as they are at their height of their beauty, though the flowerhead has a tendency to recede.

Those plants remain a source of pride and amazement to us. That they have spread from two single specimens spaced about six feet apart, to what they now bountifully present; two sizeable clumps of Jacks with five or six individual plants in each, they are a sight to behold.