Summer months just seem to gallop by, the days vanishing in quick succession, bringing us ever forward, leaving us to wonder where the time has gone...  Like life itself. In stark comparison to winter when the days seem to drag on endlessly, and the chores imposed upon us in winter are laborious and unenjoyable, but necessary. We can spend infinitely longer out-of-doors during the summer months, relishing the time even though we still have to tend to all manner of outdoor chores needing to be done. In contrast to winter, we tend to relish and cherish the long, lazy, amenable days of summer.

We're edging toward August and the dog days of summer. The garden is now fully summer-matured. Work in the garden now mostly consists of cutting back too-enthusiastic plant growth, snipping here and there, trying to maintain a semblance of order in a mature garden convinced it can look after itself, thank you very much. But the garden has plants with a civil temperament that wouldn't dare think of taking up more space than is absolutely required for their needs, and other vegetation that feel entitled to sneakily stretching here and there to edge out the 'territory' of their neighbours.

They have a tendency to to multiply exponentially. Some, like columbine, do this throughout the garden but in a most civilized way, and they're welcome. Others, like Ladies Mantle, Harlequin vine and Day lilies and perennial Geranium behave aggressively, pushily inveigling themselves where they've no business doing so. And so, in an effort to discipline them sometimes it's necessary to haul them out by the roots from areas they feel should be dedicated only to themselves and the gardener feels should be shared with other plants.

There are some plants that are so charming they can be forgiven any excesses in behaviour. Take, for example, annual Morning Glory vines. I have no choice whether or not to take them. They offer themselves to me. I had of course, originally planted them from seed adjacent our garden fence in several areas so I could string them up alongside the fence where the sun hits from morning onward. They decided they liked the microclimate of our backyard so much they would just settle in there for good. And they have.

I was delighted at first to see them returning each spring, self-seeding. Anxiously looking out for them and babying them along. Until I discovered I was wasting my time. They needed no encouragement nor special treatment. In fact, they've been so abundant in the last several years I took to tearing them out where they weren't wanted. Who ever thought that those delightful flowers of the morning sun would turn out to be determined invaders?

This morning I tied up some of the vines. I had previously shoved wooden wands into the ground adjacent the fence so they could grab and hold on to the wands and begin to twist their way around them. They reached the top of the wands, and so it was time to string them further up toward the tops of the fence slats. That would be fine if there were just a handful of the vines to contend with. There is in reality ongoing, grasping colonies of them.

They've seeded everywhere in the rock garden, when I really just wanted several of them at the very top of the garden, toward the front of the house, growing in the rock garden that extends alongside one side of the house, from front to back, or vice versa. They're happy to grow along the ground, strangling other plants and keeping the sun all for themselves. They're so vigorous, if left to their own determined devices they become a thick mat of vines and flowers, horizontal as well as perpendicular.

They even, mysteriously, seeded themselves in the large urn sitting at the top of the rock garden, among the geraniums and the petunias. I keep pulling them out to give the hens'n chicks some breathing room in the rock garden, and they keep re-seeding. It's hard to tell who is the gardener, but the authority in control is obviously not myself.