Goldfinches fly through the gardens, and robins and cardinals sing their hearts out in the early morning. I had been bemoaning that we hadn't seen hummingbirds this summer, and lo and behold this morning, as I was looking out the front glass door, there was one of those tiny, flighty creatures hovering over the large paniculata hydrangea for the longest time, whirring its impossibly swift wings from branch to branch and then hovering over the petunias, thrusting its sharp, minuscule beak into each trumpet-shaped flower. A wonderful sight to behold.

Yesterday we had a series of thunderstorms rage through the area. They were loud and harshly violent, the rain they brought drowning the landscape in huge volumes of water, drenching everything. And making the garden quite, quite happy. Although yesterday the flowers took a while to recover their perky poses in between the storms, this morning they've fully recovered, under morning sun.

The clouds have moved back in however, and the day will soon enough once again veer between episodes of rain and brief hiatuses where the rain holds off and the atmosphere attempts without success to shrug off the excess. In the ravine, the forest once again inundated beyond its capacity to absorb all, has developed the usual complement of puddles on the forest floor.

But the garden shines in a triumph of emphatic colour, form and texture, exulting in this spring and summer's inordinate rainfalls. No harm done to the garden, by all meaningful accounts. Growth has been accelerated and so has bloom time for perennials.

Each time we glance out a window of our house, or take a leisurely walk around the garden to see what needs to be done in small incremental tidying up chores, we're struck anew by the splendid appearance of beautiful foliage and plants thriving beyond expectation.