Butchart GardensFlower slopes rising from the pit floor

A pit grew into a garden

Victoria, Canada — Flower gardens built in a quarry.

First, take in that slope.

The several gardens sit close together, and a few steps change the scene. The Sunken Garden reads best from above — flower bands follow the slope down, low hedges rounding the edges; turn a stone stair and you are suddenly on a narrow path of only tree-shade and moss. A torii stands in the green, red and plain, its stone path running out of sight.

Water holds a place in several spots. Some jets up from a pool and breaks into mist with flowers right in front; some lies still in the middle of a bed, taking half the colour from each side. The planting changes densely — red, purple and yellow can stack into several layers in one plot; up close you see only the bed at your feet, and only from the stair do the patterns join.

Cement first, flowers later

In 1888 Robert Pim Butchart began making Portland cement near Owen Sound, Ontario. He and his wife moved to the west coast for the limestone the cement needed, and in 1904 they settled by the Tod Inlet quarry. Back then the grounds were a worksite, not a garden.

When the limestone ran out in 1909, Jennie set about turning the spent pit into the Sunken Garden, work that ran to 1921. Looking down today, the flower slopes step down along the original pit walls, and the bending path is the old way down to the bottom. The landform was not levelled — it became the garden's most recognisable feature.

More gardens were added later. In 1926 the tennis court became the Italian Garden; in 1929 the kitchen vegetable garden became the Rose Garden, designed by Seattle's Butler Sturtevant. The Rose Garden holds 2,500 plants across 280 varieties — the number sounds dense, but walking there you only catch the scent.

The torii and the fountain each have a source

In 1907, at sixty-five, the Yokohama gardener Isaburo Kishida came to Victoria at his son's invitation to build a tea garden at Esquimalt Gorge Park. Local notables asked him to add Japanese gardens at their estates, Mrs Butchart among them, and the gardens were completed before he returned to Japan in 1912. The compact walk behind that red torii still keeps its original feel.

In 1964 a shape-shifting Ross Fountain was installed in the lower reservoir to mark the garden's sixtieth anniversary. The jets keep changing height while the low flowers in front differ year to year, so from the same angle the water or the blooms are always new.

The gardens have very different characters. The Italian one is about symmetry, a thin pool splitting the beds in two; the Japanese one narrows the path to slow you down; the Sunken one opens the scale at once, best seen whole from the steps. The rhythm of a half-day comes from rotating through them.

Still in one family's hands

In 1939 the couple gave the gardens to their grandson Ian Ross as a twenty-first birthday gift. Ross ran them until his death, then his son took over; since 2001 the great-granddaughter Robin-Lee Clarke has been owner and managing director, and ownership remains in the family.

In 2004 two 30-foot totem poles were raised for the centenary, and that same year the garden was named a National Historic Site of Canada. When the maples turn red in autumn, the woodland path carries its deepest colour — walking it is quite another thing from the summer flower slopes.

The planting changes by season; do not take the bed in a photo as something always there. From the top step looking down, the layering of the pit walls outlasts the flowers.