It seemed reasonable enough to agree with Jackie and Jillie this morning when they suggested it might be a good idea to set out for our afternoon hike through the ravine earlier rather than later. Although the early morning began with sunshine, matters up there heavenward changed quickly as clouds moved in shoving blue skies elsewhere. Leading us to think that our puppies are becoming sensible little creatures, after all.

So, doing the bare minimum of breakfast clean-up off we went. Most of the clouds sailing through were white and puffy, but soon enough dark clouds began to shuffle along, muscling their way through the white to eventually predominate. Clearly, it would soon be raining. Turned out to be a cool day, jackets required, but pleasant.

The fancy took us to take another, rarely-used side trail we were once familiar with but haven't used in a year. Going off from the familiar to someplace new always excites our two little dogs, and they ran happily forward in anticipation of what may lie ahead. What did lie ahead was a very narrow trail that was well pitted with wet muck, with just enough of a rise on either side to allow careful passage where it was dry.

And then the trail suddenly diverged onto another, newer portion. Sensibly since a part of the original trail was no longer there. Instead there was a large pit where the hillside had given way where the leda clay soil had collapsed taking trees and other vegetation with it, into the creek. It was raw looking and a reminder of just how given to collapses this area is.

We gingerly continued the route we were on, dipping down toward the creek, hoping to see the pair of Mallards we'd been told were last seen there, where the creek forms a bit of a pond. That pond actually the creation of beavers that keep returning. Before we reached the pond, though, there were other, smaller areas of collapse along the increasingly narrowed trail, and we decided to surrender our mission, and returned to the main trail, retracing our steps.

We did find some newly-emerged coltsfoot there down by the water, though. Coltsfoot had bloomed earlier in the rest of the forest and had gone to seed, whereas here they were fresh and attractively yellow, bright and perky.

Trout lilies are once again outdoing themselves, with more of the plants blooming than in the average year. Among hundreds of plants, a bare .05 percent end up blooming, but there's a bit of an increase this year, just like last spring. It can be fairly exhausting sometimes, doing these treks, but always fascinating and in that sense alone, satisfying.

Then it occurred to us that since it was still fairly early we could take a short drive over to the Cleroux farm to see what they've got in their greenhouses. The Cleroux family is a large one, sprawling all over the area and they all seem, invariably, to be involved in horticulture. They're independent of the chains that have their own garden shops, and we've found over the years that their products are more mature and of better stock than those sold elsewhere.

By then it had begun raining, but there's shelter in the greenhouses, so off we went with Jackie and Jillie ecstatic that they could share 'outside' time with us other than in the ravine. Each has their place in the truck, Jillie crammed blissfully beside Irving, and Jackie on my lap. We hardly expected, on such a cool, rainy day, still fairly early, to see so many cars in their car park with people trundling about, their flat carts full of plants.

It was beyond gratifying, though to see the greenhouses full of options this year, unlike last. We were able to get most of the bedding plants and the plants meant to be grown in our garden pots in one place, this year, from zinnias to begonias, canna lilies to dracaena, and New Guinea impatiens, carnations and geraniums.

They've been arrayed on the deck in the backyard. No room for them awaiting planting to be stacked where we usually place them at the front of the house, since that, mostly, is where they'll be planted, because there are so many bags of garden soil stacked there instead, meant to fill the garden pots, and to create a new base on the front lawn to receive grass seed in Irving's plan to regenerate our pathetic lawn.