My Gleeful Floral Rampage

Too soon, too soon, warn those killjoys, all those people who know, from painful experience, that to plant tender annuals in the Ottawa Valley before the 24th of May long week-end - celebrating the birthday of Queen Victoria, as a Commonwealth country - is to invite disappointment. Night-time frosts occur with amazing regularity, despite day-time highs that belie their potential. Nipping the tender new growth and buds of annuals more accustomed to tropical climes. But the temptation for some is just too great.

Not that our gardens are utterly devoid of colour. The tulips are still blooming, but fading, as well as the narcissus and the hyacinths, although the grape hyacinths are still good for quite a while with their bright purple clusters. Our bergenia plants have sent up their long plummy stalks of bright purple-pink clusters. The fritalleries in the rock garden are still bright with colour. The paschal violets are still brightly blooming, and the bleeding hearts are full of bright pink blooms. The white-petalled anemones are happily abloom.

Still, I'm one of those tempestuous creatures who simply cannot sit idly by and let time waste when the days are long, sunny and inordinately warm for the time of year, just begging to be additionally brightened with the aspect of newly-planted annuals. And so I succumb, and begin the process of investing our tight little urban green space with bright annual colours. Surveying the tabula rasa and plying an artist's palette of vibrant colour, texture, aromas.

All those garden pots that we station here and there on the cobble hardscape so laboriously laid out by the spear-side of this gardening tandem. So handily filled with a mixture of garden dirt, sheep manure and peat moss only the day before. Tempting me beyond endurance to go ahead, be of brave heart, and plant. The dirt, manure and peat moss procured from a big-box store; their floral offerings rejected as weak pretenders, wilting under the heat of the sun, poor specimens to inhabit our ambitious landscape.

For the floral flats we go elsewhere, to a nearby farm setting, Cleroux Growers, there to feast our eyes on the offerings. Gorgeous flowers: gazania, trailing lobelia, ipomea both red and lime green. Geraniums, a dozen for $18, and we're able to select the colours we want; which is all of them. We select red-leafed, pink-flower fibrous begonias, and those with green leaves and red flowers, and also green-leafed white flowers. They thrive in our gardens, and bloom all summer long, spreading their splendid presence to their utmost ambitions.

And waxy, ever-blooming begonias, in enrapturing shades of pale pink, bright red, sunny yellow, emphatic orange, paper-white, startling fuschia. They're destined for the garden pots, not the gardens. Along with ivys, large-leafed and small. Impatiens, million bells, bacopa. Transcendingly beautiful, a gift to the eyes. One large fuschia plant with its drooping complex pink-blue bells, because the hummingbirds especially love them.

We've got seeds for nasturtium, zinnia, sweet basil, godetia, black-eyed Susan vine, and huge sunflowers. They'll shortly be going into the ground, as well. We've got a passion flower vine awaiting release from our light-filled basement, and a large assortment of other begonias, kept over from past summers, stored down in the basement. Some of them have already sprouted, a few even have the sweet minuscule beginnings of flowers.

They're as anxious to get outdoors and do their thing for the summer as we are to get them out there, planted and ready to bloom the season long.