Butchart Gardens
After a thirteen mile drive north of Central Victoria we arrived at Butchart Gardens. The gardens were started by Jenny Butchart who in the early 1900’s decided to landscape an exhausted limestone quarry belonging to her husband Robert Pim Butchart, a mine owner and one of the pioneers of Portland cement in Canada. Jenny’s earliest efforts resulted in the sunken garden which was opened to the public in 1904. The Rose and Italian gardens soon followed. Today the site is run by the couple’s grandson and covers some 130 acres and attracts about one million visitors a year. The floral displays are quite spectacular and contain around 700 different species and more than a million plants, trees and shrubs.
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