Full sun, relatively benign temperature at 25C, and a good, cooling breeze, seems just perfect for some heavy garden work. Heavy in the sense of hard pruning. Such as cutting back big time. It occurred to Irving that our back fence is so heavily crowded with decades-old trees, shrubs and roses, it will present a challenge to the installation of a new fence we've contracted for. Which will happen eventually, although we've just been given a vague date of maybe September, maybe October, maybe November. 

So he started out on an Alberta spruce, moved over to a really old climbing rose and then began work to remove parts of our venerable Corkscrew Hazel, that the annual infestation of Japanese beetles have been so hard on. Those destructive beetles divide their time between the roses and the Hazel, never seeming to bother anything else, appearing in mid-July. They've been a garden pestilence for the past decade and nothing seems to convince them they're not wanted.

Our backyard in warm weather with full sun becomes a veritable heatbox. Although our puppies love the sun and early-spring direct exposure to the sun, in the summer they take the backyard in very brief bits of time. Irving got overheated and took a break and that's when I went out to gather together the tall old rose canes and begin lopping them into manageable pieces to go into a large compost container. The first five minutes is fine, and then despite the lovely breeze, direct exposure to the sun becomes overwhelmingly uncomfortable doing that kind of demanding, awkward physical work.

I finished filling one bag with all the woody detritus and started on another. Emptied the birdbath, watered the garden pots, planted a pot of fennel, and plunged back into the house, hot and tired. We decided not to waste any more time before taking the puppies out for their afternoon hike through the forest and they agreed it was time, why were we wasting it?

So, out we went, agreeing between us that today was much, much warmer than yesterday and the breeze, although cooling, wasn't cooling us off quite sufficiently while we were also under the glare of the summer sun. That speedily changed as we entered the ravine and the forest canopy generously shaded us. Finally, the breeze did its job right handsomely, and we had instant relief from the heat.

Not many out and about on the trails. But we did come across a woman with two small girls, and than on another trail, another woman with two small girls. The first set of little girls were terrified of Jackie and Jillie, clinging to their mother's legs for protection, the younger one beginning to cry as Jillie passed by and Jackie was bringing up the rear. Irving tried to assure the little girls the puppies weren't a menace but it did little good.

The second group of two little girls had a large, happy Bernese puppy about six months old with them, and they were delighted to see Jackie and Jillie, both getting down on their haunches to try to entice them over for a rubdown. Before we ended our circuit, we came across both sets of women and their children again, arriving in the opposite direction to ours, and the very same scenarios repeated.

 We wound up our circuit by going through the path leading to the pollinating meadow and stopped at the two tomatillo plants growing among the wildflowers and predominantly crowded sawgrass beside the forest creek. There's a surprising number of fruits on each of the plants. And the encased fruits seem to be maturing very nicely. Again that mystery: where on earth did the seeds for these plants come from? 

On to the meadow, where Irving picked thimbleberries and blackberries and I waded through another sea of mixed grasses and wildflowers to come accounter the wildflowers whose presence is so captivating, the purple loosestrife, Queen Anne's lace, yarrow, fleabane, daisies and black-eyed Susans. A delightful bouquet of nature's finest. This time I noticed an American Bittersweet vine that had wound itself around a slender Poplar sapling, its bright red fruits dangling cheekily.