It begins with the tiny lime green leaves of creeping jenny popping up in patches all over the garden. Next come the dark green leaves of the climbing Hydrangea, and the silvery white ones of four siberian bugloss. The hostas pop up next like the fingers of a green witch and a day or two later the grasses turn from straw to green. The geraniums under our budding dogwood are next to emerge followed shortly by the elegant stems of solomon seal. Our four beech trees are slow to revive while the freeman maple shows its first few rust coloured leaves that will soon turn green. The fringe tree and wisteria –– les pièces de résistance –– are the last to awaken, with a spectacle of long white streamers and violet blooms so beautiful that it’s a wonder we’re in Toronto and not Monet’s garden. The only thing now left are the anemones, and they won’t appear until late Summer when the whole garden is so verdant and alive that it’s hard to imagine that all of this beauty was ever underground. I watch it all unfold like a piece of music that gradually thickens and intensifies as instruments enter one by one.