The garden is slowly shaping up. Perhaps it's not so slow, could be my expectations are just too impulsively feverish, wanting to see everything filling in before its time. But filling in is exactly what is happening. It isn't hard to recall how bare everything looked just weeks earlier. Now both of the little weeping flowering peas are fully leafed out and one after another they've flowered. The Sargentii crab trees are in full flower, dropping their petals just as the Magnolia did before them.

The annuals planted in the garden pots are coming along nicely. It will be a while yet before they begin to fill their respective urns and pots but for the present, they're bravely doing what they can. No complaints about nature's helpers, since we've had ample rain, lots of sun, and good breezes to make the garden feel quite comfortable in its developing stages.

Our usual tuberous begonias are missing but for a few we were able to access. Mostly we bought a new hybrid that grow in small clusters of little round flowers, unlike the huge blooms that we're accustomed to arranging in our garden pots. The clusters look fairly exotic, in fact, and the colours are lovely; variegated yellow/orange, bright white, soft blush pink. They create bright splashes of colour in the garden where green will always predominate. There's little that's more visually satisfying than walking through the front and back gardens to appreciate the form and colour and variety of the flowering plants.

They're quite different this year, in reflection of the fact that we've been constrained in accessing the usual venues we're accustomed to procuring our plants from. Those that we've been able to get to, masked, gloved and distancing, have just a small portion of the growing nursery stock they usually have for sale. So we've improvised and tried new types of flowering plants as options from our preferences, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

I had read about a new petunia hybrid, bred for its deep, velvety-black shade a year ago. And strangely enough though we were unable to find many if not most of the usual types and strains of flowering plants we most enjoy, there they were, a few pots of them, and many pots of the new, small, striped and colourful petunias in bright and beautiful colour combinations. At a premium price, of course, but our 65th wedding anniversary is coming up and we felt like splurging in its honour.

The result of these new purchases and their different presentations is good but there's a good reason why we miss what we have selected in the past; because those choices most closely satisfied our personal aesthetic, a result of many years of experimenting and decision-making. The fallout of the novel coronavirus has changed many things in our life-routines, too numerous to really think about, and this is just another one; that scarcity and caution now play a prominent role in everything we do, ushering us down a narrower path we may never deviate from.

In the mid-afternoon Jackie and Jillie reminded us it was time to break off from household matters and get ourselves over to the ravine. It had rained constantly and heavily throughout the morning, just as it had much of yesterday afternoon and evening. The sun came out briefly but we could see more rain clouds making their way along the horizon, and knew we'd be wise to choose a shorter route for today.

There was a little surprise adjacent the creek where we have to do an uphill jog bypassing a lower trail that had precipitously narrowed in a hillside slump at the bank of the creek, and was chain-linked closed for safety. There, where the fencing was looped around a small, dead tree, were the most enormous shelf fungi encouraged no doubt by our wet conditions to do their work of breaking down the wood fibres to turn the dead wood into pulp to replenish the mass of the forest floor.

As we rounded that upper trail and made our way down to the creek there was a sudden commotion of movement as a Great Blue Heron lifted off from the water and soared into the trees. It's action and motion seem slow and cumbersome, since it's such a large bird, but it's really seconds in total, too swift for me to snap a photo. But it settled briefly just upstream, where we could still see it and I did give it a try but the zoom lens on my little camera lacks precision so all I got was a blur, and then it was off again, for good.

We had a pleasant hike through the trails. Everything is well filled out now, and as verdant as it will ever be. As familiar as we are through long acquaintance with the forest, knowing all its little landscapes and peculiarities, we still occasionally surprise ourselves by noticing something different, and today it was the presence of a tall, knobby old Maple that must have been a stripling when the area was first logged out a century or so ago.

As we made our way over the last bridge before accessing the last hill to clamber up toward street level, we saw that a small group of teen-age girls was once again assembled, giggling and sharing treats, seated on a bright pink blanket, thrown over one of the poured concrete ramparts holding up the bridge. Jackie and Jillie were curious about what they were doing, and offered to share their edibles in a spirit of canine generosity.