These cool, fresh mornings are just perfect for wandering about the backyard. When we  slide the glass doors to the deck open, Jackie and Jillie zip out like lightning yipping frantically as they disappear down the stairs and into the garden. On the run to see who they can intercept; chipmunks and squirrels, even birds that make their home in a transitory way, in the garden. They can disappear before our two little dogs comprehend where it is they've gone to. They're quite incorrigible about it, though we keep telling them to leave the little fellows alone. It's hard to say whether it's the excitement of the chase or an aggressive entitlement to 'their' territory that gets them going.

It takes a moment, however, for things to get quietly serene, the puppies nosing about here and there sniffing out messages, and the squirrels to ignore our importuning little devils. Leaving us free to wander about here and there, though the actual 'wandering' is limited to the square footage of a very small backyard. Small it may be, but there's a lot squeezed into it, from trees and shrubs to statuary and garden sheds and garden pots filled with flowers alongside flowerbeds. 

Over the years it's grown in and over, necessitating cut-backs here and there time and again. Just as well we're not meticulous about anything. At times we seem overrun by the sheer exuberance of the vegetation.  There was a time when it seemed that apart from early spring planting there wasn't all that much to do in garden maintenance. That is no longer true; there's plenty to do to keep from becoming completely engulfed in runaway spurts of green growth. Euonymus that sends its creeping fingers into the slots between the  house siding, for example, and shoving into nearby hostas and Ladies Mantle.

The monarda is now in flower, strange looking flowers but beautiful, in bright red, dominating one end of the backyard where earlier the cranesbill geranium and mountain bluet had celebrated their time in the sun. One of our clematis vines that had died back last summer just before it was going to bloom and I thought for certain it was a goner, has renewed itself with vigour this year, and now boasts large bright red flowers. 

In the afternoon we went off to the ravine with Jackie and Jillie, and the temperature was just perfect at 23C, with a nice breeze under a cerulean sky, with the occasional puffy white cloud formation. After all the rain we had in the past several weeks the forest has dried out very well, but the rain hastened the bloom of wildflowers earlier than we would consider normal for black eyed susans, yarrow and Queen Anne's lace.

We met up with a ravine friend who informed us that one day last week he had come upon a downed hawk's nest. We'd had two days of really robust wind gusts and as sturdy as that nest was built with care by the parent hawks, it was no match, evidently, for the wild wind gusts. It appeared that the parents had flown off and most of the fledglings obviously did as well, but for one little fellow not as well developed as its nestmates. So they collected the little bird and took it along to a bird rehabilitation centre in the west end of the city.