Spring Prelude at the Butchart Gardens
"You came all the way from San Diego in the middle of winter to see the Butchart Gardens?"
I did not realize it was winter until the Canadian immigration officer said so. My concept of winter had always been the "Winter Wonderland" as sang by Michael Bublé. While it may have been four weeks past Christmas Day, it felt more like just another rainy Pacific Northwest day in Victoria, the capital city of the Canadian Province of British Columbia.
I did not visit Butchart Gardens with Thelma and Vilma six years ago because I thought I have seen enough gardens in the US. I went north of the Vancouver Islands to Nanaimo to visit Cousin Aurel and Ching instead of going south to the Saanich Peninsula by Brentwood Bay. I did not know what I was missing until Thelma showed me pictures of Vilma blooming among the blooms and floral display of the Butchart Gardens.
"Whether you're planning to visit this season or the next, there's always interesting something to see and experience."
What was posted on the Butchart Gardens website did not make me feel all the more like an idiot for visiting in the middle of a cold and wet winter. It's wonderful to be seeing tropical fishes swimming on a cold wet winter indoors. These ornamental fishes seem to be just as lucky as the caged animals at San Diego Zoo.
The Butcharts, originally from Scotland and were living in Ontario, Canada moved to Vancouver Island in 1902. Fifty years earlier, the Douglas Treaties were drafted as an agreement between British colonists and First Nations. The Douglas Treaties covered close to a thousand square kilometers of land around Vancouver Island where indigenous communities such as the Saanich, Malahat or Salish groups lived. Drafted in English, the terms of the treaties promised the First Nations their existing villages and access to the land that their ancestors considered home for the last 10,000 years or so. Aside from keeping their villages, they could also continue to fish and hunt in the lands that they have surrendered to the British colonists in exchange of clothing, cash and blankets.
The First Nations are the aboriginal communities of Canada. Scientists believe that the First Nations crossed over on foot from Asia to the North America that later became Canada, United States and Mexico at the end of the last climate change from ice age 12,000 ago. It is a common knowledge that Asia and Northern America were initially joined by a land bridge along the Bering Sea. The First Nations whom the British colonists considered illiterate had always have their totem poles. Totem poles signifies their history, culture and rights to certain territories.
Mr. Butcharts, who learned the process of Portland cement manufacture in England apparently obtained some 55 acre property of the land covered in the Douglas Tresties at the Saanich Peninsula . They established the Tod Inlet cement plant in 1902. The plant manufactured cement from limestone stores. Soon, limestone dwindled in the land that was sequestered from First Nations. Meanwhile, Mrs. Butchart who maintained her home in the quarry site spent her time planting flowers and shrubs for ornamental purposes. Reminiscent of the early 20th century beautification which later was recognized as an exceptional achievement in the Canadaian gardening history, the Butchart Gardens became a thriving enterprise more popular than Armstrong Garden Centers in the US.
Mrs. Butcharts had in mind grand estates that showcased floral displays that could add to aesthetic pleasure of her friends who were coming over for afternoon tea. With tons of top soil brought in by carts , Mrs. Butchart, along with gardeners, piled up shit higher and deeper and transformed an open ditch into a sunken garden and a pile of crap into a rock mound. A landscape consultant from Seattle was also brought in to transform the rock mound with switchback staircases something that resembles an outdoor stage fit for the lion king to be consecrated. As an imposed garden etiquette which could be more of a Victorian snootiness, selfie sticks, along with e-cigarettes and real cigarettes are not allowed in the gardens' premises.
The rock mound summit which is a little lower than the street level surface of the upper gardens provides an eye-level view of the crevices of the stone walls that Mrs. Butchart planted with ivy while seated on hanging bosun chair. Mr. Butchart , on the other hand, stocked the man-made lakes with trouts who rise to the water surface when he came by clapping his hands. It was in the same lake that Ian Ross, the Butchart grandson who inherited the garden when he was in 1939 when he was 21 devised the fountain that is named after him.
Even on a rainy day in the middle of winter, the Japanese Garden seems to stand out with its Torii gate. The Torii which is usually located at the entrance of Shinto shrines in Japan must have been the idea of Isaburo Kishida who was commissioned by Mrs. Butchart when he came to Victoria in 1907 to build a tea garden for the Esquimalt Gorge Park. To the Shinto faithful, the Torii signals the transition of the profane to the sacred.
I thought I saw Beng's rhododendrons. Actually I couldn't tell rhododendrons from camellias which are also referred to as the rose of winter. I kind of enjoyed seeing the garden at this stage when nature is taking its course.
On second thought, the rhododendrons I saw at Point Defiance Park with Beng do not bloom until spring unless they are grown indoors in a controlled environment that is set to the temperature of a tropical rainforest mimicking spring.
Meanwhile last word is from Hal Borland, an American author, journalist and naturalist: “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
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