Today we are headed to Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island. We’ve got ferry reservations so have a 30-45 minute drive to the ferry terminal south of Vancouver. Traffic is light on Sunday morning so the drive goes well and we get there slightly early and get bumped onto the earlier ferry, which is nice. It’s about a 90 minute ferry ride and takes you through a number of islands on the way. Vancouver Island is directly west of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State. It’s quite a pretty trip.
Sunken Garden at Butchart Gardens. This section used to be a quarry.
Vancouver Island Map (click to enlarge)
None of us have been here before and we’re all a bit surprised at the scope and beauty of the place when we arrive. It’s family owned and has been around for almost 120 years. The family had moved from Ontario in 1904 to build a cement plant at a limestone quarry. Once they’d exhausted the limestone deposits, Jennie Butchart envisioned filling the quarry with a grand garden. Over the years, the family added sections to the original Sunken Garden including a Japanese garden, an Italian garden and a rose garden. The family gifted the gardens to their grandson in 1939 and he turned them into a tourist attraction adding concerts, summer night lighting, and Christmas events. Today there are millions of plants in over 900 varieties and the gardens get over a million visitors every year.
Japanese Garden
We start off in the Japanese Garden. It’s a very shaded 1 acre section covered with over 70 Japanese Maples as well as Beech trees. It also has lots of small streams running through it will really pretty bridges spanning them. It’s along the water of Brentwood Bay where the family used to keep their boats.
Italian Garden
The Italian Garden was formed out of the original estate tennis court. It includes 18 flower beds, a large star fountain and includes over 80 varieties of flowers and 22,000 bulbs and biennials. It’s a quite formal layout and was probably our least favorite of the gardens.
Rose Garden
The rose garden 7 types of roses with 280 varieties (we don’t know anything about roses so are not sure what the difference is between types and varieties!). There are over 2500 plants in the garden. It’s a bit crazy how many different roses there are in the garden. They’re all labeled so you can see the names of the varieties. It’s all a bit overwhelming!
Afternoon Tea
We had made reservations for Afternoon Tea. Doug is the only one of the group that had eaten a high tea before so all agreed we should give it a try while we had the opportunity. In addition to a wide variety of teas and cocktails, the set menu included all of the following for each person:
English Trifle
Chantilly cream, sherry, sponge cake, berry compote
Signature house scone
Strawberry preserve, whipped mascarpone
Savoury sandwiches and delicacies
Cowichan Valley chicken, pickled apple, walnuts, blue cheese, fig aïoli
Cold smoked albacore tuna, fennel, olive oil, feta
Farm fresh egg, apricots, sunflower seeds, coronation dressing
English cucumber, pickled ginger, dill weed
Wild B.C. salmon, snap peas, lemon aïoli
Creamed leeks, Parmesan Reggiano, short crust
House-made sausage rollHouse-made sweets
Sheringham Distillery's Sirene chocolate liqueur truffle
Carrot cake
Lemon gâteau
Strawberry mousse slice
Chocolate ganache torte
It was all very good. Doug & Travis even liked the cucumber sandwich, which was surprising because they don’t like cucumbers. Each sandwich and sweet was small, but after all of them, everyone was quite full. It was a good meal!
The gang getting ready to dig in!
The Sunken Garden
The sunken garden is the most visually stunning part of Butchart Garden’s. It’s set up so you arrive group of trees at the top of the garden. Suddenly you’re overlooking 5 acres of beautiful flower beds, fountains, and trees. It’s built in the original quarry and took 9 years to create. There are 151 individual flower beds in the sunken garden and each spring they plant 65,000 bulbs.
Mediterranean Garden
While putting together this blog post, Doug realized that we missed a small garden that was off the parking lot! It might have been overload at that point.
A map of the gardens
After leaving the gardens, we headed back to the ferry terminal. We were hoping to catch the ferry before ours, but it was full so we ended up waiting an hour for ours. It was another lovely ride back. Once we arrived at the destination terminal, we headed towards the airport. We are catching our train first thing in the morning so are parking Mike’s Rivian truck at the airport and getting an Uber back to our condo. We find a restaurant near the airport for a quick dinner, park, and head “home”. It’s been a long, full day.
