It's late spring and already the garden's appearance is that of a lush late-summer-blooming pleasure. If there's any caveat to that it's the realization that in their successive blooms in various parts of the garden, flowering plants' pride of place in showy colour, texture and fragrance is so relatively short in duration it's almost head-spinning. Here today, gone soon after.

So it was with the bleeding hearts, the poppies, the columbine, the periwinkles, the irises and so it will soon be with the peonies. The roses are in full June flush, our old reliable and winter-tough Explorer series roses we planted decades ago and performing spectacularly. The other, newer additions are playing catch-up. Clematis vines have been putting out their lovely blooms on a great vertical scale, drawing the gardener's eye upward.

Lilies, growing taller than I've ever before seen them, are on their way to blooming. The lilies-of-the-valley had their turn and now their fragrance and their flowering bells are forgotten. The huge and superb flowers of the magnolia entertained us for quite a while, and now they're a memory, the same as the ornamental crab apple trees and the Manchu cherry, not to mention the bridal spirea.

Not the Canterbury bellflowers, though, they're just now coming into their bright and lovely own, scattered here and there in the garden beds, happily seeding where the mood takes them.

Surprisingly, our very most favourite garden plant, our various types, colours, sizes and shapes of hosta have assumed proportions even more generous than usual, a result of the copious amounts of spring rain and heat of the sun that has even more than usual distinguished mid- to late-spring. And some of them have already hoisted their flower heads preparing to bloom.

Our garden urns and miniature-garden pots seem to be flourishing with texture and vigour to please us with additional bursts of joyful colour. At this stage in the spring-summer-fall yearly venture into competing with nature there remain more than ample shows of conceited floral offerings as special treats when we venture into the garden or just look out the house windows to give us memories meant to last over the long winter months.