Fairies

Naturally - When I was a little girl, I used to go down to the vacant lot by the crane yards and pick pink-edged daisies and coltsfoot and assemble them into mounded bouquets and bring them in the house. They were treasures then, and they are still.

Right now I'm sitting on a rock looking at the transparent, misty orb of a dandelion clock, with its symmetrical golden lines, stars and pinpricks of white. Farther back in my garden is a new fairy place: forget-me-nots, buttercups, stray night-scented stocks and columbines - all spangled in the long grass.

I do have "real" garden flowers, and three times in a summer my husband goes around with his lawnmower clearing a little bit of green around them: hollyhock, snow-in-summer, poppy - and he makes the place look like a park. But even the garden flowers are on the wild side around here: my roses are old-fashioned tea roses, and the rock plants have been cheerfully smothered by swaths of foxglove, Jacob's ladder and other plants.

If dogs look like their owners (and mine does: shaggy black-and-white hair, begging love, skulking around the breadbox at midnight), plants do too - and mine, in the garden, are tall and rangy, and in the colour spectrum they play the blues.

Hideaways

So my "real" garden flowers are half-wild. Some would call them out-of-control. They make me think of old gypsy women and secret hideaways and fairy tales. And these are the cultivated flowers.

The true wild souls - or "entities" as one witchy gardener I know puts it - have gradually camped around the edges of my garden these five, seven, 10 or more years, and now, as I sit here outside, I finally give in to them. They have such splendour, why would anyone lament their crashing the party?

Any old-world gardener knows you have to save an untouched part of the garden for fairies to live in. You do not trample the fairy zone in your big clodhoppers.

If you must visit, it has to be in bare feet, and you go alone, and you don't stay long.

My front fairy garden has buttercups, but my secret fairy garden has other entities altogether. The star fairy inhabitant is Blue-Bead Lily, who begins as tongues of green fire topped with pale yellow stars - those stars turn into single black opals. Among the opals are the maidenhair ferns, unfurling right now, or, as my attuned daughter puts it, "unferning." There are tiny twinflowers, or Linnaeus Borealis; almost invisible but spreading an almond fragrance over the woodland floor. There are tiny starflowers, and below this, in a place where I have forbidden a certain person to throw old tires and tar barrels, there are Zen garden mosses by a hidden stream.

No wonder Swainson's thrush, the dancehall musician of the midsummer fairy ball, tunes his voice as I sit here writing about him.

Wild heart

Some people think dandelion clocks, stray grasses and red clover, and all the wild flowers, are nuisances; gypsies, unwanted. The rhubarb flowers tower over the mint and struggling asparagus. The cherry blossoms have fallen.

Each columbine is five swans drinking at a fountain. The trees; birch, spruce, fir, and the graceful tangle of arching branches whose name I don't know; shade the garden and protect it. The wild edges of the garden, like the wild edges of a person, are, secretly, the heart of the matter.

Kathleen Winter is a freelance writer who lives on Butterpot Mountain. Her book of fiction, "boYs," was published in 2007 by Biblioasis.