You can't help smiling when you enter a well-loved garden in the month of May. It's a treasure to behold. The cottage-style plot that I like best welcomes you to come in and meander through the pathways brushing the herbs and smelling the roses. The serendipitous volunteer flowers often choose such good company in which to commune. Imagine a sunny patch of purple and white larkspur with a sprinkling of red Shirley poppies springing up in their midst like exclamation points.

The pathways which are always thickly covered by pine needles, leaves, wood chips or gravel, might be edged with dwarf grasses and sedges, interspersed with Stella d'oro lilies, golden yellow coreopsis, rosemary, sage and thyme.

Benches and lawn chairs placed in the shade are a must for the casual cottage garden. Tending the flowers and vegetables shouldn't be a chore; you need to stop occasionally, sit down and enjoy the cardinal's trill, the butterflies' flight and the buzz of bees on the blackberry blossoms. The seating should be so placed that the gardener and visitors may sit in comfort, drinking in the sights and perhaps sipping a chilled glass of herbal tea.

The cottage garden should contain small fruit, thornless blackberries for instance, a tree or two maybe Indian cherry to share its small fruit with the birds, a willow to provide food for the larvae of the Viceroy and Morning Cloak butterfly, to shelter the rufous-crowned tiny chipping sparrows.

Oh! And there must be beds and trellises for beans, black-eyed peas and gourds, in raised beds there would be okra, potatoes, Swiss chard, kale, summer and winter squash, onions and garlic, cages holding tomatoes, pepper and eggplant. OK, time to wake up from the daydream and get to work. Gardens don't just happen -- however many lovely volunteer flowers do spring up -- they must still be weeded and watered.

In my own garden the flea hoppers are drilling small holes, riddling the leaves of four of the six eggplants like rifle shots. I'm going to have to try to wash them away and cover the plants quickly with polypropylene floating row covers before the pests can hop back onto the leaves. There seems to be little a gardener can do to be rid of the eggplant flea hopper except protect the plant under cloth. These tiny hoppers feed on the nightshade family, are smaller than a pin head, shiny black rounded ovals that can hop hundreds of times their own height.

Many chores need to be done soon, thinning and cutting back the chrysanthemums to induce the stems to grow additional lateral branches that will produce more flowers, dead-heading coreopsis, removing some of the orange daylilies that have grown beyond their intended bounds, etc. The extra plants can be given away or thrown in the compost pile. Don't put the roots in the compost or you'll soon have a thicket of lilies shoot up through the compost debris.

The tiger lilies are about to bloom while hundreds more young plants are a bit too populous. These lilies are gorgeous; large flowers are deep-orange with black spots. Tiger lilies produce many seeds, most of which must be viable.

The tropical milkweed Asclepias curassavica (an annual in Oklahoma) and our local milkweed (Asclepias tuberose s perennial, a.k.a. butterfly weed) are in bloom. Their color is almost the same orange as that of tiger lilies. Milkweeds are an important food for Monarch larvae; the nectar attracts the adult Monarchs as well as many other butterflies. I've noticed that the blackberry flowers attract honeybees and several varieties of butterflies.

Roses are blooming lustily all over town. Especially noticeable are the Knock-Out variety that come in single or double petals, pink, rose, white and red. One day early this month I had parked near the Cleveland County Master Gardener Association's Teaching and Demonstration Gardens while attending the Farm Market. I saw how lovely the red Knock-Out Rose looked through the chain-link fence, so I whipped out my handy camera. The photo accompanies this column. Knock-Out Roses are tough and trouble-free, one does not even need to dead-headed them. They keep blooming all summer until the first heavy frost.

The Katy Road Pink Rose that I started from a cutting three years ago also is now a tough, trouble-free large shrub that is covered with huge pink flowers. Katy Road Pink has a similar flower shape and its blooms are the same shade of pink as my double poppies and the peony flowers.

It's raining on this Wednesday evening as I'm finishing this column. Won't the flowers and vegetables look great tomorrow? Already most of my 15 tomato plants have many small tomatoes and are filling the width of their cages. It is true that they had to be wrapped up against the cold some nights, but the trouble seems to have been worth the effort. Also, the okra is up and the potato plants will soon offer up their yummy crop.

Upcoming events: Guided tours will be given by members of the Cleveland County Master Gardeners Association's Teaching/Demonstration Gardens at the Fairgrounds across the west parking lot Saturdays and Wednesdays from 9 a.m. until noon. Knowledgeable guides will answer questions that area residents might have about gardening and landscape plants.

Betty Culpepper may be reached at bculpepper3@cox.net for comment, questions or ideas for future columns.