A spectacular archway of wisteria in Boston, Mass.

Recipes: Three favourite chilled soups for hot summer days: vichyssoise, gazpacho and avocado.

Diary: Fixing our pocket garden with a new arbour, and lots more.

As we are leaving England this spring, we visit a few of the great stately home gardens, where wisteria climbs profusely up ancient brick walls. The blossoms are coming out, dangling from the tender vines like great succulent clusters of grapes. The scent is overpowering and in some cases there seem to be more blossoms than vine leaves. Not so at home in Toronto, where we have apparently been lax in pruning our wisteria, such that for the past couple of years it has refused to offer a single blossom. Our neighbours both have wisteria and on one side they are blessed with an abundance of lilac coloured blossoms and a heavenly scent. On the other side their vine exhibits all the signs of life of a dead parrot. My excuse for ours is two devastatingly cold winters and the anomalies of pocket gardens in the city.

Ripe tomatoes picked fresh from the garden

The decision to remove the python-like gnarled trunks that have over time destroyed much of our arbor was easy. The tree guys had it gone in a flash. Our lovely 30 foot tall Japanese red maple is also showing signs of stress, and the diagnosis is that it has got to go. Down that comes as well, and the autopsy reveals a rotten centre in the trunk.

When we brought in a contractor to see about repairing the arbour, he leaned on one of the uprights and it snapped at the base. Oh well, start from scratch. Now that job is done, it is time to address the wonky interlocking paving. Another contractor and days of painstaking work have seen the job completed.

Meanwhile, the flowering hawthorn we had planted a couple of seasons ago is looking very sick. We take a sample twig to the garden centre whence it came and the expert declares it sick with a fungus. Since our garden is now tree-less, we look at tubs of new trees and the expert kindly offers us a new Japanese maple at half price. We accept and a day later it is installed by a very pleasant young French lad from Avignon.

Gazpacho – chilled soup from Andalucia

Our eastern European gardeners arrive to weed and prune and plant and finally the garden is back to a semblance of normal. Of course, it will be weeks before all the new growth blends together and softens into a cohesive whole, but at least we are ready to entertain again.

Dining on hot summer nights argues for at least a cold soup for starters and I delve into my recipe cards for appropriate offerings.

If you think of cold soups, vichyssoise immediately comes first to mind.  Nothing is more delicious than a hearty potato and leek soup, but in summertime it is too hearty. Chilled, with the addition of thick cream and, voilà, a sensuous, silky summer soup.

Chilled avocado soup – Aguacate Diane

I’m sure we all think vichyssoise is a French creation, but Julia Child, in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking firmly states it is an American invention. Further research takes us to M. Louis Diat, a chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. In 1950 he wrote in the New Yorker magazine that in 1917 he “reflected upon the potato and leek soup of my childhood, which my grandmother used to make. During the summer my older brother and I used to cool it off by pouring in cold milk. I resolved to make something of the sort for our patrons and named it after the town of Vichy, not far from our home in France.”

However, I have something else in mind for the first supper under our new arbour and remembering our annual visits to Mexico, the rich, ripe taste of gazpacho seems more appropriate. In fact, this raw vegetable soup comes from Andalusia, Spain, and goes back at least to Moorish times, with possibly even Roman origins. In those days soup usually contained an element of stale bread, but I have omitted that unneccessary thickener from my recipe, while keeping the traditional goodly portion of olive oil.

Third in my trio of chilled soups is avocado, which seems to be fashionably new and suddenly on the menu in every restaurant in Toronto this summer. It is really easy and my creamy version, surprisingly, contains no dairy at all.

It hails from Colombia, where they call it crema de aguacate, although the traditional version is served warm. It’s a staple of the city of Tumaco on the Pacific west coast.

All three are delicious and Diane has taste tested each one as it comes out of the kitchen. The last she declared the most yummy, so I have named it for her.