This certainly rates as one of the most weather-unusual springs I have ever experienced in my years of gardening. Usually, by now, our garden pots and urns would be starting out with bursts of annual colour crowding their interiors. Not this spring. Usually we 'jump the gun', as it were, getting our annual planting in before the May 24 week-end, when usually it is considered safe from frosts to set tender plants in the garden.

We've got some warmer weather on the horizon. And we hope that finally we'll be able to plant. Even if we don't the perennials, as they continue to erupt out of the soil will eventually fill in the still-empty places in the garden. But it's in the garden pots and urns that the annuals usually get to show off their ornamental, ever-blooming presence, and we've been tardy this year.

Magnolia tree beginning its bloom!

The garden soil, peat moss and sheep manure are all there, waiting to fill the pots, but the opportunity is missing. Yesterday, during our ravine walk in the forest we kept coming across light showers, and on our return home the skies opened up again with seriously drenching rain. And so far, today, it's been raining again, no doubt sending shivers of dread down the spines of those people whom Dame Fortune has failed to bless, with lakes and rivers over-running their banks and into their homes. Spring planting would be the very last thing on these folks' minds.

Everything in the gardens is later erupting out of the soil this year. But when we see them, we feel redeemed, excited at the prospect of another blooming garden and the sensual, aesthetic pleasure it grants us through the summer months. We could use some dry, sunny days, and we're assured that before many days have passed, we'll have them. We can only wait and see.

What a wonderful weather day yesterday turned out to be. Much more reflective of what May usually brings us. The temperature had moderated nicely, there was little wind, and the sun was blissfully out, warming the atmosphere and lighting the landscape.

Usually, by this time each spring, we've started planting all of our many large garden pots and urns, an exciting time of creating miniature colourful gardens of annuals to complement the burgeoning gardens full of perennials that the pots flank. All of it together makes for a multi-layered, textural, colourful and eye-pleasing landscape comprising our very own magic garden.

My husband went out after breakfast to pick up the usual number of bags of garden soil, aged sheep's manure and peat moss needed to fill up the pots. They're emptied in the fall, all of their contents shovelled into the gardens as topsoil, the withering annuals placed in composting bags. But for the begonias and the potato vines; they are cleaned off and stored overwinter in the basement, to be brought back out at the end of May and re-planted in the backyard pots and gardens.

While my husband was off doing that I baked our Friday-night dinner dessert, and prepared some of the dinner ahead, putting on a chicken soup to steam up the kitchen with its restorative fragrance. On his return, we went off to the ravine for our daily walk-about in the forest. And a more lovely spring day to do that in could hardly be imagined. We noted that the first of the Serviceberry trees are now in bloom, their white blossoms covering the trees, to produce what is commonly referred to as Saskatoon berries, a favourite ingredient out West for pies.

We could even allow ourselves to imagine that this was an ordinary day in May, by which time the trails would all be nicely dry and spring wildflowers would be making their appearance. Unfortunately, this year has been unusual, with the amount of unending rain that caused some of the hillsides in the ravine to slump, affecting homes whose property lines backed onto the ravine.

Serious work is ongoing now beyond the foot of our street, where it meets a major thoroughfare, beyond which the Bilberry Creek Ravine forest commences. There the street itself has been fenced off, not the roadway but the sidewalk, and people have to cross the road to continue on their way.

There is a considerable assembly of huge construction equipment roaring away into the atmosphere busy with the work ahead of somehow constructing some kind of road alongside a huge culvert to act as an improved storm sewage system to take the water off safely. How it is intended to impact on the hillside above is perhaps known to the engineers who have blueprinted the process, but it's beyond us.

Still, as long as heavy rains don't continue -- although the weather forecast has warned that the current dry, warmer and sunny atmosphere will come to an end on Saturday and Sunday when showers are expected -- showers in their place will hardly constitute a threat unless it is that the already-saturated ground will react even to ongoing showers. In which case some of the houses adjacent those that have been vacated will also be impacted.

For us fortunate ones living across the street, life goes on as normal. And, as we normally do, we hied ourselves up to the entrance of the ravine, saw that no more work was being done in its near vicinity for the time being, and made our way past the gates installed there with the intention of keeping us out.

It's a sobering sight to see the great, gaping slumps, some of them so close to the trail itself. But once we descend the major trail into the ravine, all is normal. And we continued with our usual daily circuit under a heavy cloud cover, a slight wind and cooler temperature.

For the greater part of our walk in the woods we had it all to ourselves. We did eventually come across a few acquaintances, also out to take advantage of the opportunity to greet nature, in however a cantankerous mood she has been in of late.

We came across the first of the semi-larger mauve-purple woodland violets finally in bloom. As well as the more numerous, but still shy trout lilies. And the nicely productive thimbleberry bushes have also made their presence, the foliage bright green, not yet prepared to set out their pretty pink blossoms that will morph into tasty berries.

As for the ground underfoot, it remains deep in muck in many places. But there are signs that it is beginning to dry up, where the muddy clay has become more firm and we're less susceptible to sliding in it. So, overall, things are looking up.

We set out for our usual ravine walk in the forest yesterday, planning to bushwhack our way in and onto the trails since because of emergency work gates have been erected at the entry point, but were seen by someone cutting down trees close to the entrance who warned us off, concerned with safety issues. So we ended up walking down the street, crossing the busy intersection at the foot of the street and accessing another portion of the ravine that we used to frequent several years back when the bridges in the ravine were being replaced and heavy construction equipment was everywhere, widening the trails and making a general mess in there.

Weren't we surprised coming abreast of the creek as we descended toward the forest, to see a school of fair-sized goldfish? Goldfish now much too large to fit into anyone's home aquarium, much less a commercial one. Goldfish that are there because someone had the bright idea of releasing them to the wild, though they're a species whose natural habitat is Asia, not North America. Goldfish, in such numbers that we assume they were released from the stock of some pet shop which had decided for reasons known only to them that they wanted to rid themselves of the tiny beasties.

We'd seen them for the first time when they were tiny, two years ago. Since we haven't been back to that area since, we had no idea that they would have adapted to their new environment, and they certainly appear to have. We always consider the creek, because of the composition of its bottom, to be sterile for fish, and rarely have seen any there; insects like water striders and caddis-fly larvae, we have seen. So it's a fair supposition that whatever zooplankton is there, along with bug larvae, have kept these beautiful orange swimmers alive. Alive and thriving, since they've managed, amazingly, to get through two nastily icy typical Ottawa winters, and they are now many times their original size; in fact, downright large.

We don't prefer that part of the ravine to our own, accessible just up our street, but we're fortunate to have it as an alternative to our more familiar, far more trail-extensive portion of the ravine. We do find the botanical specimens thriving there different than our own; very few trilliums, though lilies-of-the-valley aplenty, and not many other spring flowers. It was pretty muddy underfoot, but would have been far more so, only a day or two previously.

But at least its presence enabled us to get out into the woods for a walk-about; good for our two little dogs and for us as well. It now looks, from what we've been told by a municipal worker, that it's likely the work being undertaken by the construction crew in an effort to remediate the problem with the ravine hillside erosion, will take more than the original month estimated. Not happy news for us.

Our incessant rain events may have come to a stop, but it will take quite a while for the landscape to fully return to normal. Everything is saturated. The hillside slumps in the ravine are continuing. Trees continue their slide into the ravine, along with the Leda clay-infused soil that has become so destabilized. That being the fact, it's difficult to see how further erosion, given the composition of the soil, can be avoided. The three houses that have been 'quarantined' by the presence of an eight-foot-high construction fence will never be declared safe from further deterioration. And it seems to me that the municipal authorities that gave license to the builder to construct on such friable ground will have little option but to offer those homeowners to buy their properties with a mind to destroying them and replacing them with a small park.

Elsewhere in the ravine everything seems normal, if one can use that word to describe the morass that the forest floor has become, completely suffused with the results of unceasing rain at a time when full absorption of the deluge left by the spring melt of snow and ice hadn't been fully accomplished.

Yesterday was cold and somewhat windy, but not compared to the mean, biting wind of the day before and the episodic snow flurries. As we made our initial descent into the forest through the main trail leading off the street we live on across from the ravine, we could see below to the right a crew of workers installing tall construction fences across both sides of one of the bridges we normally take when we return from our daily circuit.

But as we turn normally in the opposite direction to access a bridge on the left, when we embark on our daily forest walkabout, we were unperturbed and went on our way; obviously we would have to devise an alternate route for our return, at some point doubling back onto the trail that took us deeper into the forest, after near-completion of our circuit.

The trails and the forest floor will remain steeped in muck for awhile, but no further such temporary morasses should logically occur as the area dries out, as long as those furious rain events move on and out of our close neighbourhood. Finally, we saw some bright orange fungi thriving among the rich layers of moss, the orange and green a lively contrast to the dull aspect of fall's foliage covering the forest floor, turned a laundry-day-inspired insipid grey.

As we neared the completion of our circuit, we doubled back and Jackie knows immediately that we're on terrain we had previously passed over earlier in our walk, and he dislikes this enormously for some strange reason; he always has, attempting to resist and to go onward to the usual circuit. That's a bit of a nuisance, since for a little fellow he has an awful lot to say about our route, in his estimation.

We could see as we approached the entrance/exit to our street, that more slumps had brought the yawning crater closer to the high fencing beside the trail where once there had been an expanse of gently sloping hillside, soon becoming steeper by far.  A portion of the earlier, more temporary fencing had caved in along with the slump, and it didn't bode particularly well for that area we've become so familiar with and which represents a vital part of our natural recreational outings.

It wasn't until we turned the corner toward our street in the final few yards to exiting the ravine that we realized the crews had been busy during our perambulation in the woods, setting up a tall fencing apparatus separating the trail from the street, necessitating that we bushwhack beyond it, expending somewhat more energy and balance than we're accustomed to, in that portion of the trail where we access the street and return home.

There, for now at least, the incessant rain appears to have worked out its fury. But not before causing unprecedented havoc across Canada. Quebec seems to be the hardest-hit province for flooding. People have done their best to protect their homes, sandbagging furiously, the military has been called out to give assistance in evacuating people and helping with ongoing sandbagging. It seems as though all the rivers and lakes that rose so precipitously and dangerously have now crested. Not hard to have compassion for people caught in this dreadful situation. Some spring this has been, one to go down in the annals of atmospheric anomalies; at least we hope it will represent an anomaly and not what we will be have to increasingly expect from climate and changing weather conditions.

Our gardens don't appear to have suffered too much. Yesterday, though the rain had ceased, it was so cold, the temperature having dipped the night before to freezing, that we went through episodic snow flurry events throughout the day. Not a particularly lovely day, since beside the cold, the wind was wicked.  And in the ravine our brisk walk along trails suffocated in muck included some slipping-and-sliding challenges.

The Bleeding Hearts are beginning to flower; at least one small clump is, the others are working furiously to catch up, as it were. The red Trilliums in the garden are up, and surrounding them the colonized Foam Flowers are just beginning their bloom, as well.

And of course Grape Hyacinths and Pulmonaria, both early to bloom in the spring, are now in flower, as well, their bright blue presence an aesthetic salve to the otherwise bare and drab garden, though the Heucheras are rallying and the Lilies are coming up and the Irises, and the Peonies and even the Hostas are slowly beginning to emerge from the soil suffused with rain. Surprisingly, some of the Clematis vines have already begun to emerge.

All the hundreds of flower buds on the larger of the Magnolia trees have swelled, their carmine colour clearly visible, the buds on the cusp of opening to their lush flower form, but they are yet hesitating, waiting for the sun to return and bless them with the kiss of its warmth and light. The bright pink of the first of the Bergenias to bloom makes a very nice splash. And Forget-me-Nots are everywhere in the garden, sending up their little buds, ready to burst into tiny blue flowers.

Spring, after all, is hiding coquettishly behind all this bizarre weather, ready to surprise us with its tardy entrance. When it does, the tulips which have for days looked as though they were ready to reveal their petalled colour, will no doubt surprise us, as well.

Recalcitrant spring has no conscience. That's the impression we  can no longer evade. After all, it's May, when flowers are expected to celebrate their release from the ice-bound soil after the tedious winter months. They're doing their best. It's nature's reluctant spring that's the culprit, deigning not to cooperate.

The grape hyacinths are up, decidedly; they're doughty little warriors, taking on these cold temperatures, high winds and incessant rain. Rain, that's the major concern at the moment; far too much of it. So too the pulmonaria and the Bergenia.

It's not only the garden that's drowning, but areas all over Canada have been steeped in muddy floods calling for emergency responses and the evacuation of people from their homes.What could possibly be more wrenching for people than to have to abandon their comfortable existence, leave the houses that provide them with shelter, with the conveniences of life in the modern era, with the comfort of being in your own home. King there no longer; nature has decided that a show of Queenly sovereign entitlements is due, just to teach us our place.

We managed to get out yesterday in a break in these never-ending rain events, so of course it was extremely muddy underfoot. Water laying about in great puddles, quite transforming the normal look of the forest floor; the trees reflecting on the pools lying about them and we imagine the struggle of their roots not to drown in the excess.

On higher ground where slopes on either side of the trail lead down into the ravine it tends to be drier and that's where under these circumstances, hiking is preferable, but it's impossible to entirely avoid the drenched areas since they're everywhere.

We had slipped our puppies' raincoats into our rainjacket pockets before we set out on our daily walk. Before too long we came across light showers, turning slightly heavier before once again subsiding. Usually when there's a window between rain events and we slip out to take advantage of it, we can return back home after an hour or so before the rain begins again in earnest.

Toward the end of our circuit yesterday we looked up at the hillside behind our street that has been the cause of forcing people to evacuate their homes and could see that further erosion through large slumps has occurred. The temporary orange fencing that was put up by the municipality to keep people away from the trail behind the street has now itself slumped down the hill as additional erosion occurs in response to the unending rain.

It became even colder overnight as the temperature dipped to freezing. Consequently, light rain events on an already saturated atmosphere and landscape turned to snow flurries. And it was snow flurries that greeted us first thing this morning.

May? Spring? Flowers? Eventually.