Butchart Gardens
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The Butchart Gardens are a botanical tourist attraction located in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, a small village on the Saanich Peninsula that is part of Greater Victoria on Vancouver Island. They were originally created under the supervision of Jennie Butchart.
In 1904 Jennie Butchart's husband, Robert Pim Butchart, had abandoned a worked-out quarry site left behind from his pioneer work with Portland cement. Mrs. Butchart then began to beautify the exhausted limestone quarry by committing herself to the gradual horticultural development of what later became the Butchart Gardens.
By 2004, staff were executing a series of replantings yearly throughout the gardens. A full-time staff of fifty gardeners uses over one million bedding plants in some seven hundred different varieties to ensure uninterrupted blooming from March through October.
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[edit] History
Robert Butchart first began manufacturing Portland cement near his birthplace of Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. Mr. Butchart first came to the West Coast of Canada because of his interest in the rich limestone deposits vital for cement production.
Jennie Butchart began working on the gardens in 1904, the same year her husband built a new factory and their house at Tod Inlet on Vancouver Island. The plant stopped manufacturing cement in 1916, but continued to make tiles and flowerpots as late as 1950. After Mr. Butchart's company abandoned the site, Mrs. Butchart conceived a plan for refurbishing the quarry pit. She requisitioned tons of topsoil from nearby farmland, had it brought over to Tod Inlet by horse and cart, and used it to line the floor of the abandoned quarry, which later became the Sunken Garden. The only surviving portion of Mr. Butchart's Tod Inlet cement factory today is the tall chimney of a long-vanished kiln. The chimney is visible from the Sunken Garden Lookout.
Mr. Buchart, a collector of ornamental birds from all over the world, kept a parrot in the main house, ducks in the Star Pond and peacocks on the front lawn. Additionally, he built several elaborate birdhouses throughout the gardens, and he trained pigeons at the site of the present-day Begonia Bower.
In 1905, the Butcharts developed a Japanese garden with the help of a Japanese landscape designer. The Japanese garden is one of the oldest surviving areas of the estate, with many of the original plantings still in residence, including Japanese maples, variegated dogwoods and Tibetan blue poppies.
By 1929, the Butcharts had created an Italian garden on the site of their old tennis court and a rose garden in lieu of the couple's large kitchen-vegetable patch.
By the 1920s, more than fifty thousand people came each year to see the Butchart Gardens. The Butcharts christened their estate "Benvenuto," the Italian word for "Welcome," and furnished it with a bowling alley; an indoor, salt-water swimming pool; a paneled billiard room and a self-playing Aeolian pipe organ—a wonder in its day. Today the residence contains a restaurant in the dining room. The Butchart family, which still operates the gardens as a family business, uses some of the rooms as offices and some for personal family entertaining.
The Butchart Gardens offers a year-round display of flowering plants. Over one million people visit each year, not only for the flora, but for the entertainment and lighting displays presented each summer and Christmas.
[edit] Facts and Figures
- In 1982 the Canadian pavilion opened at Epcot Centre in Orlando Florida. Part of the attraction features a large garden based on the Butchart Gardens.
