It felt absolutely glorious yesterday to be out working in the garden. Non-stop in a sense, since I managed somehow to find room to plant all the awaiting flats and pots of annuals that we'd bought in the days previous to my planting frenzy. For me, this is an exciting event. Each of the waiting pots and urns, and spare spaces in the gardens where the perennials permit me to plant a few annuals, represent a blank slate.

The choice is mine, of plant types, sizes, features, and colours. Sometimes I have the urge with certain pots to mix colours, and sometimes I opt to refrain from using any but one colour. But the need to place together various plants that complement one another is fairly constant. If the pot has a large enough capacity, there should be a central feature of some height, with others of lesser height, not necessarily size, surrounding it, and pinched in among them little fillers that will grow to produce smaller flowers like bacopa, or just foliage, like vinca, sometimes in a cascading manner.

At first the job seems almost overwhelming, since there's so much to do. And while that's happening I will often notice things other than that in the garden which require some attention. I try to be as methodical as I can but there are times my attention gets waylaid, and then I return to my original intention. It's fun, a bedazzling enterprise, even though the finished product can appear paltry because all of the plants are far from mature. The results are always satisfying, nonetheless, to see those bright pops of colour where none had been.

 As the plants mature in time -- sometimes surprisingly little time -- everything melds, seems to naturalize, look comfortable together. The architecture of the garden, everything textured and well-mannered for the most part (I tugged an intrusive Engleman's Ivy out of one of the garden beds yesterday, deep-rooted and many tentacled that I had thought I'd got rid of last summer; one of those unwelcome, unbidden guests that sometimes appear in the garden).

So yesterday the front-of-the-house garden pots were more or less finished. Now I've got to tackle the backyard pots. And that's where most of the canna lily roots, the begonias, the dahlias, the potato vines will be going, that I've over-wintered in the basement.