I am sorry for the thousands of my blog  readers for my absence.  It is spring in the Paradise and I have more outside experiences than writing my blog.  Still there is a new entry.

This last weekend, Pat and I drove down to Victoria in Little Red (top down, lots of sunshine).  We were going to visit my cousin Wylie and his wife Maggie but the highpoint was to visit the Butchart gardens.

Butchart Gardens is a huge garden development started in 1904 by the wife of a local millionaire.  He owned a local cement factory and used this land to quarry limestone.  They built their mansion on the property and the wife started to develop a high end English Garden using the abandoned quarry and the farms around.  In the 20s she made full use of the workers from her husband’s local plant as slave labour.  (Today a senior executive that used employees from his company for personal use would likely go to jail, but they were different times)

By the 1960s the gardens were a huge commercial enterprise and it is now a National Heritage site.

I had never been to the gardens but had heard of them.  Pat had visited many years ago and still had remembered them.

Well let me tell you, I have seen great gardens in Europe and Japan, but the Butchart is the greatest I have ever seen.  Kind of expensive to visit, but worth it.  Granted we had a perfect sunshine day just before the Victoria day weekend to see it, but still spectacular.  I attach just a couple of pictures

When we came back we rearranged our annual planting in our yard to try and use some of the display layouts we saw.  We will be visiting again.