Where to begin to describe such a whimsical yet profoundly expertly designed garden featuring nature's most riveting features in a landscape? Replete with ornamental trees backgrounded by acres of forest, where granite protruding out of the eastern Ontario rural environment creates its own drama, covered with lichen, and an artist's found-object-sculptures placed here and there as though to emphasize the stunning presence of native botanical specimens among cultivated genus types originating in the faroff mountains of China and Iran have made peace with one another.

As I followed the spare figure of the white-haired man whose property this was -- all 50 acres of land once farmed but long since returned to nature and the growth of a dense forest -- it struck me that we were approaching an extraordinary garden. It had the immediate appearance of gardening ambition writ large resembling in no way most ordinary gardening adventures, pleasing in their own balanced view of a cultivated landscape, but found wanting in the view of this experience.

The rarity of some of the specimens anchoring the garden beds and borders demanded attention and that's precisely what I gave them, perhaps open-mouthed as I said with incredulity, you can grow Catalpa here?, is that really a white birch? and this is only the second time in my life I've seen a Camperdown Elm!

Among the elderly mature trees mentioned there were also magnolias, spruces and cedars. There was a raked-pea-gravel Zen garden, there was an area devoted to Bonsai, and as far as whim is concerned, what the master gardener informed me was his favourite plant, mullein, growing everywhere, haphazardly, wherever it happened to seed itself, tall and stalwart, like statuary standing on guard.

And here and there, colourful birdhouses, and large glass carboys, transparent, empty, glossy-wet with rain. What superb garden would be complete without a pond, so there too was a pond complete with aquatic plants, but void of fish. They were, in the spring, all daintily lifted out of the pond, one by one, by a Great Blue heron that felt they were there for its delectation.

Deer had nibbled at the foliage of the Campderdown Elm. Our two little dogs sniffed around avidly and curiously, given permission to roam about, small enough to do no damage. This patient and sweet-mannered man answered all my questions with courtly grace, smiled gently at my enthusiasms, took me over to one of the windows at the back of his venerable house to lift two fossilized stones sitting on the windowsill and there, behind each, was a resident toad.

The garden had an aura of magic about it. Each time I looked at one or another of the micro-landscapes that the gardener had created -- now a man of 82 and still more than physically capable of caring for the garden that in their youth he and his wife planted together -- it felt to me as though nature had given her timeless stamp of approval. I felt as though I would never want to leave, as though it would be enough to just be there, looking at each element in this creation.

When I was given permission to take photographs of the garden, as if on cue, rain began falling again. Heavy enough to have to escort our little dogs back into our vehicle. And though the rain kept falling I didn't mind, I just kept moving about from one part of the garden to another, hoping to document for my own greedy pleasure what I was seeing, knowing that my mind's eye would 'forget' details and recall only impressions.

And how disappointing it was when once again at home I downloaded the photographs and found them all, without exception, wanting that crucial element of recognition of the extraordinary that escaped the photographs. They do no justice whatever to what I had witnessed with my humble eyes whose capacity, I now realize, far outstrips the recording mechanism of a mere camera.