A century of beauty
VICTORIA, B.C. — The Butchart Gardens turns 100 this year, and it doesn’t look a day over a hyacinth in spring bloom.
Nor does it bear the slightest resemblance to a limestone quarry used to produce the ingredients for cement a century ago.
Today, the old pit features a powerfully colorful arrangement of flower beds and trees interspersed with ponds and statues — a constantly manicured garden that draws more than a million visitors yearly.
Guests can follow a concrete path that guides them through four sections — the Sunken, Japanese, Rose and Italian gardens, respectively — or they can meander through the beautiful surroundings.
Visitors move slowly, awed sometimes by the color arrangement, other times by the simple, yet perfect shape of a single flower. Sometimes they stand still just as a butterfly or a bee hovers around a purple Felicia kingfisher daisy, offering a new color contrast.
It’s a walk that can last all day or a few hours, depending on the pace and the urge to revisit sections for fear of missing something, or the need to see it with the sun casting a different light.
Regardless of the time spent, the flawless plants usually evoke tremendous envy among backyard gardeners.
The Sunken Garden is an ideal place to start the journey, for it provides the strongest connection to the Butchart Gardens’ history.
A kiln stack from the cement plant still remains in the garden. It sits 50 feet below a lookout and serves as a stark reminder of Robert Pim Butchart’s original mission, the Vancouver Portland Cement Co.
He mined the quarry of its limestone from 1904 to 1908, then shipped loads of portland cement to coastal cities along the Pacific Northwest.
But as the limestone supply depleted, the quarry slowly took on a new look, beginning with Lombardy and white poplars and Persian plums planted by Jennie Butchart, the hardware man’s wife.
Seeing how Jennie Butchart had already developed a landscaping touch around her coveside house north of the quarry, friends challenged her to do the same thing along the floor of the abandoned pit.
Today, that limestone floor is covered with tons of topsoil hauled by horse-drawn cart and is the centerpiece attraction.
Enclosed by a thick stand of evergreen trees — arborvitae in landscape parlance — the garden is teeming with tulips, forget-me-nots, pansies and daisies by early spring. A relay race of colors ensues once the rhododendrons and cherry and plum blossoms arrive late spring and early summer.
It’s easy to get caught up in the lookout view. And the scene changes with each step down the switchback staircase leading to the garden.
At the garden’s end is a lake with a fountain rising as high as 70 feet. It was built by the Butcharts’ grandson Ian Ross in 1964 to commemorate the gardens’ 60th birthday.
The path leading past a concert lawn arrives at the Rose Garden, which features an archway entrance wrapped in climbing and arbor roses. A vegetable garden more than 80 years ago, this section now features about 250 hybrid tea roses, many identified by their country of origin.
Just like the Sunken Garden, the Rose Garden ends with a fountain, but this one — the Three Sturgeons Fountain — features three bronze fish originally cast in Florence, Italy.
Next is the Japanese Garden, where the Butcharts lived and where the first seeds — some of them Himalayan blue poppy — were planted. A traditional Torri gate marks the entrance to the shaded garden started in 1906 with help from a Japanese landcaper.
The path leads to another lookout point to see the cove, and Saanich Inlet, a view the Butcharts once enjoyed.
The Japanese Garden provides several benches and gazebos for resting under shade cast by some of Butchart’s oldest trees: beech, cutleaf maple and dogwood.
The last stop is the Italian Garden, where the Butcharts entertained guests, played tennis and bowled for more than 20 years. Today, the garden includes a basic staple of tulips, daffodils and begonias, as well as a bronze statue of the greek god Mercury.
The Italian Garden might conclude the self-guided tour, but it doesn’t have to end. It can resume with repeat visits to any of the gardens, for here are no time limits imposed on guests — perhaps the most enjoyable feature of all.