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An
exhilirating experience by limousine to remember The Butchart Gardens were started in 1904 by Jennie Butchart as small flower beds outside the Butchart residence next to her husband Robert's cement factory twelve miles north of Victoria on Tod Inlet. The Butchart Gardens, as they became know, were first opened to the public in 1915 and have been a Victoria landmark ever since. In
1906 Jennie hired Isaboru Kishida, a Japanese landscape artist,
to design a garden for the sloping area between the house and the
ocean. This became the Japanese garden. By 1910, the first phase
of the Japanese garden was complete. In 1908, the cement factory's quarry was exhausted
of limestone and abandoned. Jennie decided to turn the gaping hole
that was left by the quarry into a garden. With the help of a landscape
artist named Cole from Seattle, Washington and another landscape
artist named Raoul Robillard, the project was underway by 1912.
Tons of topsoil was brought from neighboring farms and used to make
beds in parts of the quarry, while other parts were lined and allowed
to fill with water from a natural spring and turned into lakes.
the Butchart Gardens' most ambitious garden, The Sunken Garden,
was completed in 1921. |
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