Hot and humid means the garden and all vegetation is thriving. But while the forest vegetation looks after itself the garden needs a bit of help. Although the garden is nature's product, the plants we grow in it are not necessarily as nature designed them. They've had a little help from human agency in their cultivation. And they need to be babied, as it were, more than their natural-growth counterparts. So this afternoon, despite the steamy heat the pots were watered in the backyard and the front garden. We've so many garden pots and urns it takes awhile to get them all done. 

And there were shrubs needing to be cut back again, as well as the foliage of some trees like the weeping mulberries, hanging down like fountains, obscuring the view of other parts of the garden and crying out for a bit of tidying-up. What really needed tidying was the brickwork, the walkways and the patios, full of fallen leaves from the magnolia, the cedar and the ornamental crabs. They look fine, but they keep dropping leaves.

The street was quiet, no one at all out doing anything but me. Too hot for most people to want to be out. But I've got so much invested in the garden, it can't be neglected. I could see that some flowering plants were beginning to look a bit parched. Saturday is a kind of catch-up day, when I'm relieved of most housework, and I plan to do other things, and so I devote an hour or two to the garden.

 

Earlier I baked some chocolate cookies with butterscotch chips. I wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies, but found no packages in the pantry, which surprised me. Not a good day to put the oven on, but it doesn't take long to bake cookies. And it hardly matters how old our children are, the first thing they head for on entering the house is the cookie jar.

When I came back in from the garden, I gave Jackie and Jillie their afternoon vegetable salad that they clamour for, then I prepared a summer salad for us, with an assortment of beans and chopped vegetables. We'll have sandwiches tonight with the salad, corned beef on onion buns for a change, and fresh Ontario cherries for dessert.

We'd already been out early in the morning for our ravine walk, to avoid the heat of the afternoon. And it was hotter in the forest than usual, the buildup of heat from several days previous, in this current heat wave. We noticed that some vandals had pulled down part of the fencing where the bank above the creek is collapsing. The insubstantial wire fence installed a few months back to warn people against using an old trail perched on the bank, part of which had collapsed.

This time halfway though our ramble, we saw a good-sized garter snake hurriedly winding its way off the trail into the bracken of the forest floor. I wasn't fast enough to get a good snap of the fellow, but I did give it a try. Usually, they're content to just make it into the undergrowth without completely disappearing into the interior. 

This one sought out the safety of putting as much space between Jackie and itself as possible. Could be his size, larger than others we've seen, but this was the first time I'd seen Jackie notice a snake, much less try to approach one.

Despite the fast-growing heat of the day, we took our time dawdling about here and there. Irving picking the odd berry for Jacki9e and Jillie, and me poised with my camera to snap photographs of wildflowers. The sunflowers are now beginning to bloom brightly, catching the bright warmth of the sun, comfortably established in areas beside the trail where the sun obviously does penetrate for enough of the day to encourage their growth there. 

There was no end of dogs being walked through the forest, most of them eager to head down to the creek to cool off their paws, some dipping deep into the cooling water. The bridges fording the creek are always wet with dripping dog paws. One learns to create a reasonable space, if at all possible, between oneself and a dog emerging from the creek to avoid unwanted showers.