All American Hydroponics

Everybody that goes to Vancouver to visit ends up going to Victoria on Vancouver Island. It is a great place to go with lots of history. And the best thing to see and do in Victoria is Butchart Gardens.

If you like flowers, you will love this place. It is simply amazing. It is the best flower garden I have even been to. It has more roses than several of the worlds best known rose gardens. It has flowers of all types, of different climates, and they are all beautiful. Of course when we went they were all in bloom. The best time to go is in the summer months of June- August.

Covering 55 acres, Butchart Gardens began with an idea by Jeannie Butchart to beautify a worked-out limestone quarry which had supplied her husbands nearby cement plant. Through the skillful mixture of rare and exotic shrubs, trees, and flowers, often personally collected by the Butcharts during their world travels, the now famous Sunken Garden was created. What started as a hobby and one garden grew into the Japanese, Rose and Italian gardens. By the 1920s more than 50 thousand people came every year. Now, over a million people visit the gardens every year.

My favorite was the Rose garden. A short walk through traditional perennial borders, covered by rose arches, leads to a frog fountain and to the right, a wishing-well of Italian wrought-iron. You then wander the garden with its lawn surrounded by dwarf boxwood hedges and a flagstone walk. Many varieties of Hybrid Tea Roses are marked with country of origin and year selected b the American Rose Society. The path curves though and open pergola, the arches covered with climbing and arbour roses, and leads to the Sturgeon Fountain.

The Sunken Garden is also breathtaking. If you see any postcard of Victoria, and it has a picture of a garden on it, it will be of the Sunken Garden. And the garden is even more beautiful in person than in the postcards.

My husband is not a big garden person. And he was kind of wondering why we were paying so much to go see a garden. But when he got inside he fell in love with the place as well. If we had the time we would have spent all day there.

Inside the actual Butchart Gardens you cannot sit or walk on the grass. But right outside where the parking is there are the Mediterranean Garden and here you can sit and picnic on the grass or play Frisbee or whatever. There is even plenty of shade to relax for a nap.

During July and August they even have nightly fireworks displays that attract thousands of locals. You can sit on the lawn close to the Concert Stage and enjoy classical musical concerts during the day and fireworks at night. After dusk the gardens are illuminated by hidden lights that transform them into something else entirely. You have to see it for yourself to understand what I am talking about.

If you are in Vancouver, do yourself a favor and get to Butchart Gardens. You will remember it for the rest of your life.