The irresistible urge to get out into the garden and become re-acquainted with gardening tools and re-awakening plants is particularly acute on days like today, when the weather has moderated to the extent of double digits, the sun is out and the wind no longer quite as assertive. I had meant, last fall, to remember this spring to move a hibiscus that I had planted in a space in the garden that turned out not to be ideal to convince it to bloom as handsomely as it should.

Spring, I felt, would be a better time to move the sensitive little shrub than fall. Before moving it, though, I  had to find a place where it would be content, where sun exposure would be at its maximum, and in our gardens, front and back, sun exposure is at a premium. There are too many trees overlooking the gardens in the front, interfering with the sun's loving glance throughout the day, and we've entirely too much stuffed into a fairly limited garden space. The situation in the backyard is even more limited.

But it was in the back that I selected a place for the hibiscus, and transferred it carefully, taking care to put down plenty of mixed bone-and-blood-meal, and watering it in well in the depression I had dug, before placing the shrub into it. At this time of year, once the frost has left the garden soil, it becomes more friable, looser, easier to work with, and so it proved. I took the opportunity as well to cut back wayward outlier branches of the corkscrew Hazel growing haphazardly out of its trunk.

Jackie and Jillie contented themselves while I was out in the garden, wallowing on the deck in the sun; on their backs, their stomachs, different poses to make certain they arranged for the sun to warm them completely. Once I was finished they followed me back into the house because they've never wanted to be outside unless one of us was there too.

Soon afterward we left for the ravine, on a perfect spring day to traipse along the forest trails. The forest floor remains bare-looking, strewn with a depth of leaf mass, absent the abundance of bracken that will accommodate themselves to greening up the now-empty spaces by early summer. We haven't had any rain for over a week, and in that space of time the forest has dried up nicely, the trails firm and absent the muck we'd been treading through up to the present since the first arrival of spring.

But we can make out strawberry plants, and bedding straw coming up, as well as all manner of ferns and lots of woodland violets, and plentiful drifts of trout lilies. This year more lilies-of-the-valley have appeared, particularly around the trunks of trees than we've seen for quite a few years, though no floral sprays have yet bloomed. I keep looking  hopefully for blue-eyed grass, those tiny, bright and beautiful little iris-lookalikes. We saw one beside one of the forest paths years ago, appearing for two successive years, but it has never since returned.

What we did see today was a number of delicate tiny woodland violets, the first of the violets to bloom, pale mauve and minuscule.And this spring is turning out to be an exceptional one for the flowering of the trout lilies since normally though there are hundreds of plants, it's only the foliage that we see and vanishingly few of the flowers. Today we saw more flowers among the trout lily drifts than we can recall seeing in previous years.

The flowers are modest in size, and extremely shy, leaning toward the sun, bright little specks of gold, which don't photograph very well. The trilliums, in contrast, though they don't tend to be large, appear robust in size against the trout lilies. The greater preponderance of trilliums that bloom in the ravine are carmine-coloured, reactive to the acidic soil that predominates in the forested ravine.

But we do know that there are spots on the hillsides of the ravine where white trilliums grow, as well. They tend to come up and bloom a bit later than the red ones. Their foliage is shaped differently, narrower than those of the red trilliums, and their paper-white blooms don't tend to nod, as do the red trilliums. Instead white trilliums are bolder, looking directly and perkily up, not down. I did scramble down one of the hillsides to where in other years I've seen white trillums, and sure enough a patch was coming up, but the buds of the flowers were still immature, though I could see white poking through.

And when we passed the spot on the forest floor astride the upper main trail of the ravine, where we know there's a patch of partridgeberry, we could also see, peering at the low-growing vegetation, scarcely above the leafmass, that it is finally producing its bright red berries, from the tiny white flowers that had bloomed much earlier in the spring.