Queen Anne's lace, ajuga, chicory, trailing lotus and milkweed are all now in generous bloom alongside the greensward of the highways in Eastern Ontario. When we were driving out of the long drive leading to the country home and studio of the man we had visited yesterday there was a tiny chipmunk in the middle of the road, refusing to move even as we moved steadily toward it. My husband used his horn briefly, and no response from the chipmunk. He had to exit the vehicle and move toward the chipmunk before it agreed to temporarily dislocate itself from the narrow drive so we could proceed.

Soy field

The tiny animal belonged there more than we did. Just like the two toads that our kindly host showed me, hiding behind fossilized bits of rock that he had propped on a windowsill at the side of his house. They hardly moved as well, from their familiar perch, as the elderly gentleman whose home it was gently moved each rock aside to reveal the presence of the toads, comfortable and secure.

Yesterday was a day of endless rain events, from thunderstorms to pop-up showers. As luck had it for us, there was an interval of about an hour before the rain began again, lending us the opportunity to take Jack and Jill for their usual afternoon walk in the ravine. The atmosphere and the landscape, of course, were completely drenched, and the vibrant greens dripped thei8r excess moisture over us, until finally rain started up again just as we were exiting.

After which we set out for the drive that would take us to the small community of North Gower where my husband had made arrangements to go to the art studio and home of a man from whom we'd previously bought a 19th Century Welsh painting, to have a look at a companion painting whose canvas had also been penetrated, requiring repair -- at which my husband is fairly skilled.

The drive was pleasant, even in the rain, as country drives tend to be, serene and green and of huge interest to these urban dwellers. We passed fields of soy and corn, no doubt hugely appreciative of this rainy weekend. And residences along the way, isolated from any near neighbours, but not that long a drive into Ottawa, should it be required. Old farmhouses with their outbuildings, and cattle grazing in nearby fields. Small towns with the inevitable heritage churches, usually Presbyterian, United, Catholic or Anglican, though we did pass one small religious building whose name was obviously of East Indian origin.

When we arrived close to our destination, under an hour's drive from our own home, there was a long narrow driveway off the main highway to reach the property of the man we were to visit. That long driveway went, as it happens, through some of his acreage, 50 some-odd in total, and one couldn't help think of how difficult it must make exit-and-entry during the snowy winter months. And it was that drive from which the tiny chipmunk had refused to budge.

Soon afterward, my husband introduced me, as I sat in the truck with our two little dogs, to the man he had come to meet, a gracious, elderly man of 82, an area artist who produces 'found' sculptures and non-representational paintings. And who most generously invited me and our dogs to walk about his property. Which they did with gay abandon, though instantly responding when I called them back, as I looked about behind his house, utterly enthralled by the discovery of what I can only describe as a magical garden representing long years of loving labour and skilled attendance.