With our good neighbours to our right, whom we've known for the past twenty-five years, we're exploring the cost of replacing our backyard fence. It links to their backyard only on one side, to neighbours behind us who planted a hedge about a decade ago at the back and on the opposite side, to neighbours we've known for over thirty years. We have good relations with the first neighbour and there's no question we split the cost there. The neighbours in back are third owners of their house and unlike their predecessors, have never been friendly.

We won't even mention the fence to them when it's replaced, since their hedge 'separates' us as far as they're concerned. As to the neighbours on the left, he's a social recluse and only if he's forced by unavoidable circumstances to acknowledge the presence of other people will he grudgingly speak to anyone. Our relations with him have deteriorated over the years; he speaks to no one on the street, irrespective of how long they've lived there, and will cross the street rather than speak to someone. No point discussing splitting the cost of the fence with him.

This morning the fence was measured and the fencing company will come back to us and our neighbour on the right with their cost to us for both a wood replacement fence and vinyl fencing. Erected over thirty years ago when the houses were new and so were the fences, it's time to replace them. They're getting pretty rickety and have had to be repaired from time to time the last five years. There will be strangers in the backyard for as long as it takes to erect a new fence after taking down the old one, and Jackie and Jillie will have to get used to it.

It's the perfect time of year to get it done though, since the garden is still pretty much asleep. And that's another thing, an established garden with borders against fences makes for an awkward proposition in fence replacement. There will inevitably be casualties and I shrink at the very idea. But that's life; there are far worse things to consider.

Another beautiful day dawned this morning with full sun, light breeze and an eventual afternoon high temperature of 18C. So of course Jackie and Jillie took us for a prolonged tramp through the woods this afternoon. We couldn't wish for more ideal conditions to cruise along the forest trails, fully appreciating the difference between these spring days and last month's.

Slowly but surely everything is recovering from winter's icy hiatus. Bracken on the forest floor is beginning its tentative but determined break from the leaf mass composting the clay-and-sand soil. We're amazed that wildflowers have taken such a giant leap forward. But of course this is their time to do that, before the leafy canopy of the forest kicks in and their exposure to sun filtering down on the ground ends. 

The red trilliums are now beginning to bloom, bright red and shy. Shy in that the stems will not hold their flower heads erect, instead bowing to the ground, unlike the white trilliums that hold their flower heads erect to the sky. So getting a photograph of the trilliums can be a little tricky, requiring some twisting acrobatics on the part of whoever it is that holds the camera.

The same thing occurs with the trout lilies, also starting to bloom, although there will be many hundreds of the plants that remain sterile of flowers. In wide patches of a thousand plants, only about a hundred of them will actually end up carrying a bloom. And they too point their flowerheads downward, not tilting them toward the sun, even though yellow flowers depend on the presence of sun to open their petals.

So too with the coltsfoot, responsive to the bright light of the sun, otherwise they fold themselves closed. There are entire colonies of the coltsfoot, more than we've ever seen before, all in bloom, sharing a limited space, but spread out luxuriantly, providing an early source of nectar and pollen to insect pollinators.