For gardeners, this was the long-awaited spring weekend when Monday's Victoria Day marked the assumed safety point in our planting zone when the frenzy of the garden could take place. After Victoria Day, a third of the way through the month of May climatologists with Environment Canada theorize that danger of night-time frost will have passed.

In years gone by the anxiety to begin planting at the initial stages of warmth and sun in early May I would feverishly place annuals in our garden pots only to face the unfortunate reality that these tender plants were endangered when frost warnings were issued. The idea then was to place protective coverings over everything so they could pass the night and its frosty temperature without withering and dying. We were mostly successful, but it was a nuisance.

Now, we wait. Common sense sometimes does beat emotional need and anxiety, but not too often.

Of course, I had as the saying goes, 'jumped the gun' somewhat. I'd begun planting the week before. And though there were nighttime temperatures close to freezing, the plants managed to survive nicely; that critical freezing temperature simply had worn itself out.

As for the springtime flower bonanza in the ravine on the forest floor, it has been later occurring this year than most. We're curious to see old acquaintances when they do come up, and celebrate their eruptions out of the humus of the forest floor, and feel happily satisfied when they do. And we always look for blue-eyed grass which we saw in just one area, which repeated itself in several years' succession, but has never returned. One lonely little plant, minuscule and overwhelmingly beautiful.

Overwhelming is as good a descriptive as any to describe our aesthetic sense when we're trodding the trails in the forest and variant shades of green from lime to dark green enclose us. It feels as though we've been plunged into a green world, an almost surreal sensation, with its own special quality of restfulness and home-coming.

Recalling what we'd come across several years earlier when we were doing some off-trail clambering about on the many hillsides of the ravine, we descended off the trails at a point where we recalled having seen white trilliums. All of the trilliums that bloom in the ravine are of the purple variety, and we assume this is because there is a clay base in this geographic area. Sure enough, we didn't have to climb down very far before we came across clumps of bright white trilliums.

As it happened, yesterday was fairly warm. Not quite enough so that we felt compelled to take along a water bottle for Jackie and Jillie, but warm nonetheless. We had embarked on yesterday's trail rambling earlier than usual, so at that time in the late morning the temperature hadn't reached its peak for the day. But it was sunny, though breezy and warm enough.

Some of the wild apple trees are beginning to bloom. We saw, for the first time yet this spring, two dragonflies. Their transparent wings glittered in the sun as they alighted on dogwood shrubs beginning to leaf out and even produce their floral sprays.

The last photograph I snapped after our ravine walk, before going to work int he garden, was one of a portion of the front garden, where finally what we call a garden is beginning to resemble one, at long last.