Sometimes I think that I garden the other seven and a half months of the year simply for the sheer pleasure of the scents and the scenes in my garden the first two weeks of June. I obviously need to spread out the bloom season even more than I have, but there is no escaping the fact that right now is the peak of enjoyment in the garden. It’s high time I stopped planting and potting to just take a stroll around to enjoy today’s offerings.

I’ll start with the pool garden: every day has brought something new into bloom. No sooner had the spring tulips dropped their last few petals than the irises started to bloom. The most numerous are an old, rather aggressive variety with yellow-tan standards, rich maroon falls, and golden beards. These are softened by the companionship of a variety I call my lemon iris — soft yellow color, lemon fragrance, and no name. They might have an identity crisis if I didn’t spend so much time with them, sniffing their citrus perfume. A few other bearded iris accent these more numerous ones: Cinderella’s Coach, a pumpkin-orange variety with red-orange beards, and an intense yellow one with white centers to their falls and golden yellow beards. They both look like flamenco dancers twirling around, their skirts straight out from the spin.

The peonies are in bloom as well, first the new tree peony, with its one enormous yellow flower. I’m patient — tree peonies can live fifty to one hundred years — and I am sure it will have more blossoms as it matures. The herbaceous peonies opened next, fragrant bowls of white or cream, flecked with yellow or red. They remind me of old colonial homes, their front walks lined with peonies that have seen generations of families come and go. I am trying to site mine carefully. Their long lives are balanced by a reluctance to be moved.

More spots of color round out the view in the pool garden: spikes of blue cammassia (the last spring bulb to bloom or the first of summer?); Jacob’s ladder with clusters of pure white flowers; celandine, a weed with cheery, bright yellow flowers that make me reluctant to pull it out; and columbine, white flowers facing down, periwinkle and pale blue flowers facing up, or maroon flowers so numerous I had to stake the plant, all looking like fancy petticoats hung out to dry. Even the foliage there makes accents and counterpoints: wooly gray-green lambs ears tying the plants to the cement pavers, curly tansy leaves balancing the straight spikes of iris, fringed Artemesia foliage clustered around the ankles of the Egyptian onions, and broad oval Hosta leaves edged in white, showing off against all the green plants yet to bloom.

Sated with the soft colors of the pool garden, I move on to the cottage garden. On route, I pass the herb border. Nothing outstanding there now, the carpet of forget-me-nots having faded, with one notable exception. The oriental poppies are marvelous this year: a dozen vivid orange tissue-paper-petalled flowers eight inches across are open at once. Their black centers are filled with a froth of equally black stamens around a black-topped pistil. Do bees ever get lost as they climb into that blackness? Some purple chive blossoms and lavender Geraniums add a few more balance notes, but the herbs are a generally subdued lot.

But oh, the cottage garden! A battalion of lupine stalks stand like rockets poised for take-off. Pink ones, pink with fuchsia, solid blue, blue and white, blue with indigo, and a very few all white. Amazing what a few generations of crossbreeding will do. The garden is a veritable jungle, because everything in it likes to self-seed — that’s the nature of a cottage garden. Dames’ rocket in white, pink or purple intersperse the lupine. An occasional columbine tries to assert itself, while buttercups sprinkle their yellow punctuation marks here and there. Ferns and daylily leaves try to tone things down, as does the lime-green of the azalea bush. (The azalea dropped all its blossoms in embarrassed haste last week when a hailstorm convinced it that it was still winter.) A single mahogany iris and another clump of neon poppies are part of the any-color-goes-in-the-cottage-garden theory. And on an arbor above it all float white and periwinkle clematis, like water lilies gone airborne.

Even the wildlife think it’s all worth a visit. In the time I’ve been out here, a pair of goldfinches and a pair of catbirds have vanished into the dense arborvitae (is there a red light hanging from the foliage?), several chipmunks have scampered through the pool garden, and scores of honey and bumble bees have been foraging in everything that blooms. And as I write, a hummingbird, apparently tired of hovering in the columbine, has perched on a guy wire, playing lord of all he surveys. For the moment, I’ll let him think it’s his garden, not mine.