By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer
Just as artists learn by studying museum pieces, gardeners do well to study outstanding gardens. With that in mind, I recently took a notebook and camera to The Butchart Gardens near Victoria, British Columbia.
It remains one of the world’s truly great gardens because it must: it gets no public funding, so has to be good enough to draw scads of paying visitors. They come because it’s well worth the trip.
Jenny Butchart started it all in 1904 with a Japanese garden, which has matured beautifully in the last century.
The notion of a show garden developed gradually: when the limestone quarry on the south side of the property played out, she used its striking topography to frame a spectacular garden.
Woodland plants, annual beds, perennial borders, spring- and summer-flowering bulbs, roses, water features, shrub beds, and formal Italian garden all followed. Today there’s even a new Mediterranean landscape backed by a 40-foot-tall sheared leyland cypress hedge just north of the east parking lots.
Garden care is nearly all human powered: acres of lawn are edged with hand clippers, not string trimmers, and weeding is done with stirrup hoes and one- and two-tined cultivators. “Expectations drive much of what we do,” says Rick Los, Butchart’s Director of Horticulture. “Our mandate is for the best show, not the easiest.” More than 50 full-time gardeners—nearly one per acre—make it possible.
The bias here is definitely sustainable. “We haven’t used insecticides here in two years,” says Los.
“Insect predators occur naturally; we just had to find out what they are and increase them.” When the right beneficial insects aren’t present, Butchart buys them from Applied Bionomics. “They ship all over the world, and they’re just down the road, so we use their products.” Organic fertilizer is mixed locally, and compost is made on site in prodigious quantities. Roses are probably the last hurdle. Los says that “It’s this climate that makes disease control so difficult”—but they’re studying it.
Los’s secrets to success are simple. “I always come back to the basics,” he told me. “Good soil. Right plant, right place. And if something isn’t right, make it right.”
Ironically, The Garden’s guests are a bigger challenge than insects, diseases, birds, slugs, and deer combined. At the Saturday night fireworks show, kids and a few adults inevitably invade the flower beds in search of a better view. That’s why you see rows of flowering annuals growing in a field near the fireworks display area: they’re quick replacements for their trampled sisters.
Like any garden, Butchart changes from month to month. But unlike most gardens, it never seems to have an off-peak season. Visit when your own garden is in a funk, and make notes on which plants Butchart uses to span the gap between what blooms earlier and what comes on later. (Plants here aren’t labeled, but if you have a digital camera, that won’t be a problem. Take close-ups of mystery plants, and get their names from staff at the plant i.d. station near the Italian garden.)
“Borders are about 30 percent different from year to year,” Los told me, with color schemes changing along the way. This year, there were lots of mixed purple/yellow and purple/red combinations. “It’s just the flavor of the year,” says Los. “Nothing magic.”
Maybe not. But the garden itself is magic, and a great place to learn some tricks that will make your own garden amazingly better.
