When we start the day by taking our two little puppies out to the backyard first thing, it also gives us a chance to look around the garden nominally to glimpse what's new, because there's always something new. Throughout the course of the morning as we make additional trips there's more time to linger and enjoy the changing landscape, as tiny as our backyard is.

 

The purple columbine in the rock garden and the one in the back garden have bloomed, are still blooming, but there are three more pink clumps in the rock garden and they've just begun blooming. It's a mystery where they came from. Decades ago I likely planted one of them, but they've somehow moved about here and there in various parts of the garden since that long-ago time, and it's a delight to see them showing their bright little faces in mid-spring.

 

They have a lot of competition in the rock garden, dense with sedum and ferns, bugleweed and periwinkle and Ladies mantel, and hostas, but they know how to look after themselves and they do so gracefully, and we're the fortunate recipients of pleasure at their appearance year after year.  Speaking of sedum, last summer when I planted the large stone urn at the top of the rock garden with geraniums I lifted a few strands of rooted sedum from the rock garden into the urn for a bit of additional architectural interest.

 

The sedum evidently found this new location much to its liking. I hadn't emptied the urn of its soil last fall, and it overwintered as is. When spring came I was amazed to see the urn completely taken over by sedum. It's in full yellow bloom now, with a single geranium tucked in beside it. Riotous, which is how  I feel as well about the Morning Glories that I once planted from seed along the fence beside the rock garden. They too enjoy their home at the top of the rock garden; at this time of spring I find hundreds of emerging morning glories, prepared as the months go by to entirely own the area, climbing the fence and even sending their vines up and around the urn, into the urn, stifling everything, including the Hens'n Chicks below.

 

 

We took ourselves off for a hike through the ravine around mid-afternoon. Another partially sunny, wholly muggy day, with the blessed relief of a cooling breeze on a 27C day. Which meant taking along a water bottle for Jackie and Jillie. They haven't yet undertaken the personal responsibility to cart it along themselves, so Irving is both the carrier and the dispenser.

 

It's been an unusual spring in the forest. This is the first time ever we've seen the understory dogwood shrubs and trees so full of floral panicles. The sight of them stippling the dogwoods is amazing. Usually there appears at this time of year a haphazard assortment of flowers on the various dogwoods, but this year they're thickly displayed all over the plants and it's amazing.

 

 

The wild strawberries are now seriously flowering, so it should be a good year for soft fruit out of the forest. False Solomon's Seal is in flower, and so is foamflower, although we see a lot less of the latter and far more of the former this spring, which too is unusual. The verdant aspect of the newly-leafed-out forest is punctuated here and there by bright splashes of colour. We've now seen the first of the buttercups to bloom and more spring phlox is blooming as well. 

When we finally returned home, after a long and enjoyable traipse through the forest trails, the usual inspection of the flower beds and borders of the front occupied us briefly. The very foremost front garden bed is a disappointment, just as it had been last year. The family business where we formerly chose large, robust marigolds and zinnias closed permanently before spring planting, after having been in business for generations. We haven't been able to find the same quality of flowers elsewhere.

 

But the rest of the garden, the perennials and the plants we buy for our garden pots and urns look promising for continuous colourful bloom this summer. And after the long cold winter of black-and-white and the following spring of grey-and-black, late spring is an absolute joy, flaunting its ability to change the landscape unerringly with lavish applications of sun and rain. And finally, the garden is beginning to resemble the garden we know and treasure.