Once spring finally hits its stride -- roughly about this time of the month, mid-May -- after April's proverbial showers, all growing things have received sufficient encouragement and assurances that it's safe to make their presence, to poke their way out of the soil, delighting us with their appearance. The gardens at our home now appear as anxious as we are to begin the process of negotiating for space and bloom time.

Unfortunately, many blooming things like our magnificent Magnolia trees have a window of bloom and no longer. The high winds that usually accompany some of these days make short work of the splendour of the wildly pink blooms ornamenting the trees, ripping them apart, and depositing them on the grass below.

Yesterday was a scorcher, one of those anomalous days when the weather takes a steep rise in temperature, and today will be a repeat. We'll have to take a water bottle along on our usual forest walk for Jackie and Jillie; yesterday we were grateful that another dog-walking acquaintance of ours had the foresight to do just that for her Golden and our two little sprites were even more grateful at her generous offer to refresh them.

Yesterday, my husband worked until noon filling up the garden pots and urns. It was much, much too hot and humid to do any kind of physical work under those circumstances. But he's as it again this morning, and we'll have to wind down as the morning progresses into the afternoon. It's a time-consuming job, but one that is necessary to enable us to begin planting the annuals we've bought in abundance.

Yesterday afternoon in fact we went out to another local but rural greenhouse complex operated by yet another local family for generations where bedding plants and annuals can be found that are robust and well cared for and there we acquired additional flowering plants; zinnias, more lobelia, petunias, dahlias, impatiens and portulaca among them.

Now, we won't have to compete with those who will be crowding greenhouses on the weekend in a mad dash to begin planting their gardens. We'll be able to take our time with the arrangements that appeal to us with the intention of growing the best gardens we've ever yet managed -- a yearly aspiration that appears to satisfy its own goal.