We had decided a few years ago that we would no longer put out all of the large ceramic garden pots that we had amassed over the years. We would focus, we convinced ourselves, on the many stone urns we had also acquired over the decades in building our modest little garden, instead. And take out just a few of the large pots.

And that's what we did for a few years. One of our neighbours was glad to adopt several of those large glazed pots and relieved us of them for her own back garden. We had placed the pots under the deck and thought they'd be of no further use to us. It was, frankly, a joy to fill them in the spring, but there was no joy whatever involved in fall preparations for winter onset, removing the spent annuals from the pots and clearing out the soil. The soil has ended up, over the years, replenishing all the garden beds.

Yesterday, however, my husband in his enthusiasm for the task at hand -- once again filling the pots with a mixture of soil, peat moss and sheep manure -- appears to have 'forgotten' that decision and took all the pots out from under the deck, deploying them in the usual places designated long ago for maximum viewing pleasure in our 'secret garden', our little Eden; most at the front of the house around the walkway and little patio leading to the porch and the front door, and some left in the backyard, mostly to re-invigorate the begonia bulbs and canna lilies that I leave overwinter in the basement.

When he was halfway through and I had pulled up some weeds out of the lawns to more or less acclimatize myself once again to the yearly ritual, we decided to break off, for a ravine walk. A not-too-cool day at 15C, with a brisk wind and heavily overcast, off we went. I was curious about nosing about in the forest to see what else had cropped up overnight. Sure enough, we spotted the first of the False Solomon's Seal coming up.

Later on, the clump of trilliums we'd been watching for, finally opened to reveal their dusty pink flowers, a bit of a hybrid between the infinitely more common crimson and the rarer whites in this clay-based woodland setting. I scrambled halfway down one of the hillsides to see whether the white trilliums had yet fully opened, and found one lonely trillium just on the cusp of fully unfurling, the clump nowhere yet near.

Jackie follows me everywhere, making his way through the underbrush, not quite as careful as I am not to step on anything tender, nor to disturb anything coming up, but the vast differential of our respect weights makes all the difference. Jillie prefers to wait up at the top of the hill; she has a tendency to remain on the trail alongside my husband, where there's ample for her to explore in any event.

When we returned home an hour and more later we re-focused on our pot-filling tasks; while my husband did the donkey work of filling the pots, I began filling their tops with a selection of annuals, almost beside myself with disbelief that we were finally able to arrange our garden. Later by several weeks than what we're accustomed to, but finally the day arrived that made it possible; there would be rain that evening and milder temperatures in the forecast, along with sun.

While we were busy, along came Margaret, who lives on the street behind us, the merest wisp of a woman whom every time we see her becomes more frail looking. She'd experienced a difficult winter and has been in physiotherapy since February. And she decided to return to her own routine of walking around the block once a day, a circuit that leads her down her street that turns into ours.