User:WBardwin/Butchart Gardens

Butchart Gardens is a privately owned and maintained botanical garden located at Tod Inlet, twelve miles north of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It was created on property used by Robert Pim Butchart, of Ontario, Canada, as a limestone quarry for his manufacture of Portland cement. Butchart Gardens has established an international reputation for its year round display of flowering plants. Plantings beds and groups of trees are carefully divided with ponds, cascading waterfalls, and meandering paths. Now internationally known, the Gardens are visited by well over a million people each year.

Garden development
In 1904, Butchart relocated his family and business near rich limestone deposits on Vancouver island. Cement was in constant demand in communities from San Francisco to Seattle, and the first sacks of Butchart's cement sailed out of Vancouver Island in 1905. Butchart built a prosperous business and establish his family in a large palatial home on a 50-acre country estate adjacent to his main quarry.

In 1906, Butchart's wife Jennie Foster Kennedy hired Isaboru Kishida, a Japanese landscape artist, to design a garden for the sloping area between the house and the ocean. Robert Buthcart supplied workmen from the cement factory to assist in the initial gardening project. By 1910, the first phase of the Japanese garden was complete. Many of the original plantings, including Japanese maples, variegated dogwoods and Tibetan blue poppies, still thrive.

An unsightly pit near the family's home emerged when a large section of the limestone quarry was exhausted in 1908. Jennie Butchart planted Lombary and white poplars along with Persian plums between the pit and the house. She then created a plan for a "Sunken Garden" within the pit, committing herself to the gradual development of a horticultural masterpiece. With the help of two landscape artists, Raoul Robillard and a man named Cole from Seattle, Washington, the project was underway by 1912. Rubble on the floor of the abandoned quarry was pushed into tall mounds of rock on which terraced flowers were planted. Tons of top soil from surrounding farmland was brought to Tod Inlet by horse and cart and carefully laid on the pit's floor. Sections of the quarry pit were lined and allowed to fill with water from a natural spring. According to the family, Jennie Butchart solved the problem of the grim gray quarry walls by dangling over the side in a boson’s chair and carefully tucking ivy into any discernible pocket or crevice in the rock. Planning and attentive care eventually produced a spectacular botanical garden.

The gardens expanded again in 1922 with the addition of an Italian Garden on the site of the Butchart's former tennis court. This formal European garden was designed by Sam Maclure. Between 1929 to 1930, the Rose Garden was created on the site of the original kitchen vegetable garden. It was designed by Seattle landscape architect Butler Sturtevant. Mr. Butchart's hobby of collecting ornamental birds is reflected in the development of ponds and watercourses for water fowl and in the placement of elaborate bird houses throughout the gardens.

Public attraction
The Butchart Gardens were first opened to the public in 1915. Their family's luxurious home, christened "Benvenuto", the Italian word for "Welcome", became a showplace as well, with a bowling alley, indoor salt-water swimming pool, panelled billiard room and a self-playing Aeolian pipe organ. Initially, the family and their staff would serve tea to all visitors. In 1915 alone, it was reported that tea was served to 18,000 people. By the 1920s, more than fifty thousand people came annually. The Gardens' popularity continued into the 1930s.

World War II stripped the Vancouver area of available manpower and the garden began to decline. With the older Butcharts in failing health, their two daughters, Jennie and Mary managed the Gardens on a reduced scale until the Butchart's grandson Robert Ian Ross returned from the war. He inherited the property when Jennie Butchart died in 1950.

Butchart Gardens remains a family business and has grown to become a premier West Coast display garden. In 1997, Ross's son Christopher took over, expanding the gardens' staff to 240. The Gardens are now owned and managed by Robert Ian Ross's daughter, Robin-Lee Clarke and her son Barnabas Butchart Clarke.

Despite further additions, the layout of the garden is very much as Jennie Butchart and her designers envisioned. By 2004, a series of replantings were being done throughout the Gardens by a full-time staff of fifty gardeners. Each year over one million bedding plants, in some 700 varieties, are placed to ensure uninterrupted bloom from March through October. In summer, thousands of colored lights dramatically light the Gardens and fireworks may be offered on Saturday evenings. At Christmas, carollers and festive entertainment complement a lavish display of lights. The former family residence today contains the Dining Room Restaurant, offices, and rooms used for entertaining. Additional dining is available at the Blue Poppy restaurant and The Coffee Shop.

Exterior links

 * Butchart Gardens