Just like that ... poof! ... summer has arrived. Two weeks ago it was so cold we used the fireplace to take the chill out of the house. Today, my husband hauled the floor fans upstairs from the basement. But not before he had gone out after breakfast to begin mixing up garden soil, peat moss and sheep manure to fill up our garden urns and pots. Hard work on a hot day. And it is a hot day, with a high approaching 30C, a scalding sun under a light breeze. If you're standing in the sun, which is where the sun is every morning at the front of the house, it's hot.

We had finished collecting most of the annual plants I mean to plant in the garden pots yesterday, and my husband is as anxious as I am to get some colour going in the garden, so he couldn't be persuaded to just fill some of the pots, not all of them, because we have amassed quite a few over the years, many of them extremely large, meaning it's back-breaking work to fill and in the fall empty them. I've tried to persuade my husband that we needn't any longer use the very large pots, but he is adamant he wants to see those miniature gardens in bloom.

While he was busy doing that, I baked a batch of brownies, fast and simple, prepared a bread dough, and put on a chicken soup for Friday evening. Then a bit of Friday cleaning, light vacuuming, and Jackie and Jillie and I went out to visit with my husband. As he was completing his task, I was preparing to embark on mine. To begin transplanting the flowers into the waiting pots into which I had sprinkled some blood-and-bonemeal.

And then we went along to the ravine for our usual gambol through the forest trails, taking care to take along a bottle of water to offer Jackie and Jillie some cool relief throughout our hike. Once into the forest the heat is bearable, since shade is now a bit deeper thanks to the almost-mature leafing out of the trees. A bit of a breeze helped. But it was hot, and Jackie and Jillie weren't their usual rambunctious selves, padding along fairly unenthusiastically.

There were treats in store for us, not so much for them, this day. We noticed a 'dead' poplar alongside the trail, one we had taken note of a few weeks back, because though it had broken completely away from the very bottom of its trunk back in the winter, now but a stump on the forest floor, the tree itself had begun to push out emerging catkins. Those catkins are now greenly lush, long and full. Not only that, but foliage too has begun to flush the branches. The instinct for survival clearly exists not only in sentient animals, but vegetation as well.

We've been looking both in the ravine and in our garden for signs of Jack-in-the-Pulpit emerging and thought perhaps by next week we'd see some of those strange and beautiful plants. Yet today a clump already showing their single-petal, striped purple flowers caught my husband's eye beside the trail. And later when we returned home, we could see that the now-two huge clumps we had transplanted a decade ago from the forest into our garden had also begun to emerge.

While we were still in the ravine my husband, whose eyesight is keener than mine also brought my attention to the growing number of Lilies-of-the-Valley beginning to erect their tiny floral bells. So much to see and to enjoy in the forest. Yet those who bicycle through the trails and those who jog through them have little opportunity -- nor, I imagine interest -- in seeing them.

For all too many bicyclists it is cycling that enthuses them, and for many among them who seek out physical challenges and thrills, the sensation of a mad rush on a bicycle equipped with wide tires setting off down a hillside, in the process establishing new 'trails' leading to erosion at sensitive points trumps any evanescent micro-landscapes in recognition of and respect for our priceless natural surroundings.