One For The Birds

Half of our driveway is still cramped with the presence of that 20-foot-long, 6-foot-tall dumpster, a bright orange, covered with green tarpaulins, waiting to be hauled away. It is entirely full, not even a matchstick would find a place for itself in all the detritus, building materials, bits of leftover stained glass, broken ceramic tile, replaced doors that have accumulated in two decades of renovations and creative impulses making this house into an expression of our very particular aesthetic.

The company we rented it from, an Eco-company, is in no hurry to pick it up, however. Everything is destined to be re-cycled by them, so they must be very busy indeed. Had we needed it for longer than the fifteen days it was rented for, we'd be paying extra, but dogged determination and exhausting effort filled its capacious interior in the period of time we'd signed on for, and we're hoping we'll be just under the 7 ton-weight of the contract.

Now that the new deck is built, and the old discarded materials hauled off into the dumpster it was time to turn attention to the garden. My husband, not yet exhausted of patience and enthusiasm, filled up all our many garden pots and urns with the soil mixture to enable me to plant the annuals, certain that at this date we'll no longer host overnight frosts. It's lovely to look outside and see them all full of colour and texture.

Yesterday morning I saw a hummingbird at the caragena standard in the front garden, its tiny yellow flowers the target. The day before my husband saw a hummingbird in the backyard, extracting nectar from the weeping pea, its tiny perfect and brilliant body in frantic flight and momentary diversion as it flitted from blossom to blossom. Yesterday too, we went out to begin collecting from a variety of plant nurseries our selections of annuals.

Then spent the remainder of the day planting them, in the gardens and in the ceramic planters, the stone classical urns, transforming our immediate landscape from spring mode to welcoming summer. Nothing like hurrying the season. But the garden is doing that for us, itself. Our three ornamental crabapples, the jade, the Sargenti, are in full bloom, as are the magnolia trees. The French lilac is setting its blooms, and Iris flower heads are already in evidence.

This morning began with a nice rain to further encourage the dahlias, impatiens, begonias, petunias, bacopa, ipomoea, lobelia, ivy, gazania, geraniums, to take healthy root to give us a fully mature display of floral bounty this summer. It was cool and windy, and we dressed to match the weather once the rain stopped, and set off for our daily ravine walk. Where another treat was in store for us, as we saw and heard grackles, crows, robins, cardinals and woodpeckers in full spring chorus.

Later heard the drawn-out sharp whistle of a sharp-shinned hawk and watched as it detached itself from the top of a conifer and flew off elsewhere in the ravine. And on our return loop there was the large blue flash of a Great Blue Heron lifting off from the rain-swollen creek, to sail slowly over the tree tops, transiting toward a Gatineau Hills lake.