Yesterday's adventure in the ravine? Well, it was an adventure. All our forays into the ravine turn out that way. We've so much to look at in the varied landscape. What we see in one place will not necessarily determine what will be seen in other areas. They are all so different.

And all of them host differentiated vegetation, from conifers and deciduous trees of an astonishing variety, to the understory of shrubs, also of great variety, and of course, seasonal wildflowers. Slowly, very slowly, yet picking up speed at a surprising level, the forest canopy and the undergrowth are beginning to green.

This isn't a climax forest by any means, it has likely been logged out repeatedly over the last hundred years and more, but there is ample evidence that time and pathogens that prey on trees have taken their toll. If we stand back and look up the hillsides at this point before the undergrowth begin crowding out vision, we can see innumerable rotting stumps amidst the trees, both immature and mature.

The forest floor is steeped in leaf mass, the upper layers representing the last several autumnal seasons' discards, just beginning to decay, while underneath is the deep, soil-enriching layers of previous generations of leaf-fall. Out of this richness comes new life, as pine, spruce, fir and cedar seedlings take root and begin their ascent, along with hawthorns, maples, oak, birch, cherry, willow and so many others as they take their inevitable and gradual position among the existing trees.

Dogwood, hazelnut, spirea and honeysuckle among other shrubs take their place between and beneath the trees, and ferns while wild blackberry, raspberry and thimbleberry all find place for their renewed growth to mature luxuriantly in this habitat that we share on the sidelines, as it were.

While Jackie and Jillie, freed at last from the constraints of winter protection over their small frames reconnoitre here and there in their endless search for woodland adventure, (each of them in turn finding treasures such as woody twigs to chew on as we progress along the trails), we ourselves peer closely about, stopping now and again, eager to discover what has emerged that we hadn't noticed the day before, largely because that emergence is often an overnight affair.

And so we came across tender green spears of lily-of-the-valley beginning to evince themselves around the trunks of forest trees. And so too did we see the first tentative clumps of foamflower that colonize certain areas of the forest. Their presence will become far more noticeable and lavish as the days progress, and they eventually produce delicate little overhead blossoms. The lily-of-the-valley are more like the trout lilies, showing off lots of foliage in dense colonies but sparing in their production of flowers.

But one thing is certain, what looks barren at the present time in this in-between period of spring slowly developing into early summer, it won't take, in actual fact, all that long before growth becomes rampant with the bracken seeming suddenly to appear in all its lush forms to transform the dull monochrome to bright shades of sparkling green.