Butchart Gardens

This morning it is snowing in our hamlet. The meterologists tell me that tomorrow will be another cold and snowy day. I am ready for spring. The daffodils have started poking their leaves from the cold ground. That is a good indicator of things to come.

Cousin Sherel shipped me these photos of Butchart Gardens. These gardens are located north of Aunt Pauline, who lives in Bellingham, WA, and Uncle Gary and Aunt Allene, who reside on Camano Island in Washington State. These pics reminded me of when I was a kid and visited these gardens.

The Butchart Gardens is a floral display garden located in the neighbourhood Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, a small village on the Saanich Peninsula in the municipality of Central Saanich, which is part of Greater Victoria on Vancouver Island. The Gardens was originally created under the supervision of Jennie Butchart.

In 1904 Jennie Butchart's husband, Robert Pim Butchart, had abandoned a worked-out quarry site left behind from his pioneer work with Portland cement. Mrs. Butchart then began to beautify the exhausted limestone quarry by committing herself to the gradual horticultural development of what later became The Butchart Gardens.

Currently the garden staff are executing a series of replantings yearly throughout the gardens. A full-time staff of fifty gardeners uses over one million bedding plants in some seven hundred different varieties to ensure uninterrupted blooming from March through October.