A Garden Fit for the Whole World

Visiting my Grandma's favorite spot, Butchart Gardens, and more

After my post about my dad last week, it is only fitting that Grandma Alice, his mother, is in my thoughts today. In fact, I’ve been thinking about Alice quite a bit lately, as she was the first person I ever heard mention Victoria, B.C. She had visited as a widow, in the late seventies, and said “I found it to be a perfectly charming city.” Though she always spoke in that old-fashioned reserved way, she really did love Victoria. Her colorful slideshow, which she was eager to show me, was clear testimony to that. She focused on the cleanliness and order she’d seen there, something she was finding, in the early 1980s, to be sorely lacking, for reasons which could all be summed up with a simple, “Pasadena is not the same city it once was.”

Grandma Alice traveled quite a bit during her short retirement—she’d earned a gold watch as a nurse at Caltech and then went back to work in a nursing home a few years later, “in order to stay busy and not waste away.” She took me to work with her on a night shift in 1981, warning me “be sure you don’t tell anyone my age, as they think I am younger than they are, and I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.” She bustled about busily, tending to and serving the elderly folks, much like I did most nights from 8pm to 4 am at my Santa Monica diner job in those days, and I sat silently, admiring her expertise and energy.

Alice didn’t welcome, or offer, much warmth, beyond a brief hug and a powdery kiss when we said hello and goodbye, but I enjoyed visiting her and hearing little snippets about her past, mostly in the form of tales of her travels. She often brought up Canada, especially clean and orderly British Columbia, with its air of not-quite-foreign-ness. She loved flowers as I knew well, since she often knitted them into her hand-made sweaters, and one of the places she enthused about was Butchart Gardens, which I finally had the pleasure of visiting yesterday.

We’d sailed down from Mill Bay where we spent a busy day provisioning and doing laundry and cleaning up ourselves and the boat after a week of travel. After a slow quiet sail down the fjord-like Saanich Inlet, we motored past the busy resort town of Brentwood Bay and into narrow, tree-lined Tod Inlet to anchor. We could have stayed in neighboring Butchart Cove, where the Gardens maintain a few mooring balls for visitors, but you can only stay on the ball for 24 hours, and we’d already decided that we’d enjoy the day more if we had an extra day before and after, which proved true.

We arrived on Tuesday a bit anxious, due to being in a new, somewhat crowded anchorage with hard to follow rules; a couple of small buoys lined the area where we anchored, but the writing on them was impossible to read (even through our binoculars) until we rowed over after anchoring—luckily, we hadn’t tied to the shore by the “caution: research” buoys or anchored north of the other buoys, so all was well. And Thursday, after our day logging 5 miles walking all over the 55 acres of gardens, lawns, and walkways that make up Butchart Gardens, we both felt like just chilling out, which was easy because it was cold and rainy all day.

But Wednesday the weather for our day at the Gardens had been perfect; it started with cloudy skies but no wind at all when it came time to go to shore. We rowed in and tied up our dinghy at Gowlland Tod Park where we proceeded to consult their trail map and ask directions of some tourists. Then we walked around to the front of the Gardens in about ten minutes. We entered on foot, unlike most visitors, and were greeted by a young woman who walked over from the car entrance and accepted our credit card ($44 each, including tax). We received a map of the gardens and a guide to the flowers and trees which both came in exceedingly handy. I will try to get the weak wifi signal to include a photo or two, but you can also check out the Garden’s website.

I found the history of the Gardens to be as compelling as the beautiful flowers and trees that surrounded us. In a nutshell, the story is that Jennie Butchart, who was married to a concrete baron decided, in the early 1900s, to bring to life the hideous empty hole in the ground that was a played out limestone quarry near their home (lime being an ingredient used to make concrete and mortar). She employed a staff of gardeners and a Japanese landscape architect and began crafting her dream. And she achieved it, over a period of about 20 years, creating a destination that began bringing visitors to their estate back in the 1920s and is now visited by almost a million visitors each year. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons!

Of course, the story of the gardens kept us thinking all day about the many ways that we modern citizens of the world could take horrible sites and turn them into desirable destinations—from toxic landfills becoming parks to building modern Gardens of Babylon in the many bombed out sites in the Middle East and other regions. We were inspired by more than Jennie’s good works, because the crowds were a veritable United Nations. Each group that passed seemed to be speaking a different language, and we heard and saw people from India, the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan, among others. Children trotted around, pointing and gasping at the statues and flowers, and many dogs paced calmly beside their owners. What a joy to spend the day among strangers from all over the world and have all of our focus be on the beauty of nature.

Granted, the gardens do not resemble wild nature—we see a tamed and idealized version of it—but there would be no gardens at all without our planet providing flowers and trees and shrubs (and succulents and cacti and the like, in other regions). Naturally, (see what I did there?) the manicured lawns, perfectly trimmed hedges, and perfectly positioned water features combined with the ideal sunny-with-puffy-white-clouds afternoon to produce a calm, inspiring effect and we were grateful we’d been encouraged to visit by family and friends. Thank you all, you were right, it was well worth the time and effort.

For those who want to read more about our travels in and around beautiful Victoria, check out my recent travel column in

Womancake Magazine

.

I can’t end this post without mentioning our niece Beth Shea, who turned 21 on Wednesday. Earlier this month she graduated from Palomar College with an associate degree (as she put it, “that’s 2 years, 4 semesters, 16 classes, and almost 3/4 of it while working at least one part-time job”). She is excited to continue her anthropological linguistics studies (I know, right?) in the fall at CSU San Marcos. We are so very proud of her enthusiasm for learning, as well as her concern for people near and far, and her fervent support of so many good causes. Yay for Beth!

Beth Shea at her graduation earlier this month

And…I just found out that a piece of my flash non-fiction was accepted by the

In a Flash Editors

here on Substack (see below); I’ll share more on that (short) story as it develops. They publish a great selection of flash stuff, so yay for me!

Next week I will be posting another in my ongoing series of book-review-as-memoir pieces so I hope to see you here then.

hasta pronto!