The brutal overnight frigid air and blasting winds moderated sufficiently by morning that when we came down for breakfast today it was -27C to start the day. But the wind had abated significantly. Yesterday, throughout the day the wind gusts were so bitter even though the thermometer rose to -20C, with the windchill factored in it felt like -40C, and Environment Canada issued one of their extreme weather warnings.

Needless to say, as weather fit for neither man nor beast continued, we decided we had little option but to keep our two little beasties and ourselves safely tucked into the house for yet another day. With hopes that tomorrow would gift us with more tolerable weather. It's at times like this during the winter when those photographs I'm so fond of taking of our garden come in handy.

If for no other reason than to remind us that there are other seasons and other reasons to appreciate what nature throws at us. Contemplating the tone, texture, architecture and colour of the garden in the winter as it appears in countless of those photos is a fragile, yet occasionally needful assist to one's mood.

During the summer months we give hardly a thought to oncoming seasons when the garden is temporarily put to rest. We're too busy ministering to the garden, a tuck here another there. The pleasure ours, entirely. When the colours and textures catch our aesthetic eye in passing, there's a brief twinge of satisfaction that we've helped nature create a garden expressing our idea of everlasting beauty.

Not so everlasting, after all, other than for the fact that it returns, season after season, expressing itself in slightly different landscapes than those that came before, as perennials, shrubs, trees and other garden denizens mature, take up more room, shove out those that are less aggressive, creating another micro-landscape altogether.

Usually just as pleasing, occasionally more so, but in the creation of these follow-up landscapes we take note of the processes and either accept them or begin to alter them to more closely reflect what it is that we intended to achieve. All of this makes for a great deal of pleasure, of satisfaction in achievement, of gratitude to nature.

A gratitude which extends, of course, to the frozen landscapes we now contemplate, burying, hiding and preserving our gardens.