Butchart Gardens

We have made it to mid August! To me it’s been hot as regular, but not too bad with these intermittent rains that we’ve gotten from time to time. Just when I think we’re about to go into a drought situation, we’ve been getting a nice storm, at least in my Little 5 mile world that I live in. So far, we have gotten enough rain that I am barely using my irrigation system at home. Each of our storms have produced just under an inch of rain at our house, which is enough for the plants that we have left for the summer months. Just last week I was invited back onto Pam Pybas‘s radio show, Fix It 101. We talked about the subject of keeping plants watered in the hot months of Mississippi. It’s easy to find if you want to listen to it, just google those words and all the past shows will pop up. I’m always honored when she asks me to be a guest on her show as she has a lot of listeners and she knows how to fix a lot of things. You can learn a lot by listening to her podcasts of practical and simple things that we all face around our homes.

August is also a month full of birthdays in my world. Mimi‘s birthday will be next Wednesday the 19th, my daughter, Mias birthday is the 23rd and probably by the time you get this article I will have a granddaughter in my little world whose birthday will be a new date in August for me to keep up with. I’m so excited. I can’t sleep. We know it’s a girl, but we don’t know her name yet. Probably by next week’s article I’ll be able to tell the world!

Last week’s article was about mine and Mimi‘s botanical garden vacation that we took north of Seattle and on up into Canada. We had stopped off at two important gardens and had wound up all the way above Victoria in a place close to Butchart Gardens. We have been hearing about these gardens all our lives and almost got there right before Covid shut the world down. We got up pretty early that morning and found a little breakfast and some very strong coffee and got ourselves up to the gardens. We were able to wear light jackets all day up there, but I did realize that the crowds would probably grow over the course of the day and I’m into taking lots of pictures of these places so I wanted to be there while the crowds were a little thinner in order to get pictures without unknown faces hiding behind the flowers. Just the walk from the parking lot to the main entrance was beautiful. They had a Mediterranean garden to walk-through and then some Sequoia trees with lots of ferns and other shade loving plants under them. As we walked through the ticket office, I looked to my right and saw an espresso Café and gave Mimi the sad look and she knew what that meant. I needed a couple of shots of espresso before I could go another step further.

All around this main entrance was planted like I picture Epcot must be. It was planted heavily with Reiger begonias and Fuchsias and other plants that we can have here in Mississippi, but not for very long when the heat and humidity decides to conquer all. We decided not to really follow the map. We just started going forward. The first beds that we saw were right before some giant arched trellises that were covered in blooming climbing roses between us and the arches were giant plantings of salmon colored Persicaria mixed with a light yellow Canna lilly. The combination absolutely blew me away, and that began to be the theme of the trip for me is looking for plants that we can grow here and the combinations that they use in these gardens. They had some very creative people working there. I thought we had seen about every combination that could be, but they really threw it out there like I’ve never seen. A lot of my pictures were about those combinations so I could come home and show Justin and John and the rest of the crew some new stuff. I saw combinations of Amaranth mixed with roses I saw burgundy colored perennial Hibiscus mixed with bright pink Zinnia.

The one plant that kept jumping out at me at every corner was Lucifer Crocosmia. That Crocosmia was everywhere on Vancouver Island. But they used it purposefully in this botanical garden, we have absolutely fallen in love with that plant and the color that it provides for a good long time. We use that Crocosmia at our house but I can promise you we’re about to use a whole lot more of it. Of course the weather there is different and they were doing things that we probably would have trouble having here because of the weather difference but imagine dark burgundy Snapdragon’s blooming with bright orange Zinnias, absolutely stunning. The paved walkways went in all directions and we were going so slow. We realized that we should probably follow a map so we could see everything and not see anything twice. We felt like Hansel and Gretel walking around in the woods as we meandered through these paths completely mesmerized. I saw pink Begonias mixed with Citronella, sounds weird, but it really worked well and I think that’s one that we could do here the chartreuse of the Citronella foliage really worked well with the dark leaves

and pink blooms of the Begonias. Another one that I think we could do here is a butter yellow Zinnia mixed with the tall, spiky, blue blooms of one of the salvias and of course that was backed up by the blood red Crocosmia.

Mimi and I were both taking pictures along the way, mostly of the same thing because we are mostly blown away by the same thing. We knew from a friend of ours that we wanted to get to the very back of the Japanese Gardens before we got out of there. We didn’t know why, but our friend told us to make sure we got back there so we acted like normal people and pulled out the map and found our way to the Japanese gardens. We had to stay on course because we had another ferry to catch that we had reservations for later that afternoon so we had to somewhat keep up with our time which was difficult for us. On our way to the back part of the 150 acre property we ran into other combinations that caught our eye and maybe some that I’ll use on the highway bed in front of our garden center. I saw Victoria Blue Salvia mixed with Crimson red Zinnia.

One that really caught my eye was a combination that again included the chartreuse foliage of citronella, but this time it was mixed with the dark purple blooms and the dark green leaves of Heliotrope, both of those plants do great here and I plan to show that one off somewhere. Just when I thought we were catching our stride and making time we ran into the Dahlia garden. That slowed us way down as we had to take pictures of each different color and shaped bloom Dahlia that they were producing at these gardens. I don’t know that there’s a flower that looks more like a painting than any other as the Dahlias do. I saw solid plantings of African daisies, or as we call them around here Gazania. African daisies do really well in Mississippi and their colors are striking. That’s a plant that we used to grow and sell a lot of your Garden Works and they fell out of favor somewhere along the way. I plan to bring that one back for next spring.

I saw red Geraniums mixed with Victoria blue salvia, which was really nice and full looking, and I loved seeing geraniums planted in the ground. The geraniums that we are used to here in Mississippi and the ones that we grow here at Garden Works come from vegetative cuttings and have a totally different look than those geraniums that are grown by seed which do better when planted directly into the ground instead of in pots. I grew some seed geraniums this past spring and apparently I didn’t grow enough because they disappeared off of the tables really quickly. I’ll do that again next spring for sure. We walked through open areas that were very manicured with beautiful green grass with dark purple trees, and the flower beds all around them. There is an iconic picture of Bouchard Gardens that most people envision when they think of this place. We found that spot way up on a hillside looking down on about 30 acres of heavily planted colorful bedding, plants and grasses. It took us a while to get away from that! I would get stuck in an area for a while and Mimi will give me the look and sometimes she would get caught up in an area and I will get impatient and give her the look back, but generally, we were looking at the same thing at the same time, it was really fun and brought back a lot of memories of plants that we haven’t seen in quite a while.

I imagine they must have a giant staff working at this place, but I don’t know that I ever saw very many of them working. I guess they do like we do at Garden Works and get there before the place opens and get the visible work done and then open up the gates to let it all happen. When we were about four hours into this walk the crowd got pretty heavy and it got harder and harder to take pictures without people in them, but it really didn’t matter. We found another coffee shop along the way and stopped to allow another couple shots of espresso for me and I think Mimi had one with me that time. We had a ways to go and I didn’t wanna start dragging. We finally made it to the Japanese Gardens, and it was absolutely stunning. It was shaded by 100 year-old Japanese maples with the ground and the rocks covered in moss. It looked like a place where fairies would live and play at night time. It was really strange to look out across the wooded area and see the ground just covered in a thick, beautiful moss.

I don’t know much about Moss gardening but I assume the pH has to be correct and I know the temperatures and the amount of light has to be just perfect and I guess we had found that place. The stewards of this botanical garden had set up some bamboo structures to walk-through and I’m pretty sure they got the giant timber bamboo for the structures off the property because we walked through some very nice timber bamboo forests. Mimi‘s favorite thing about this area was the shaped and pruned trees and shrubs, the Conifers and the Hollies were pruned into some very interesting shapes, which is something we’re trying to get better at. We finally wound our way around to the back of the Japanese Gardens to find out what our friends surprise was. She had been there before in the past and knew that we would love the huge inlet from the Pacific Ocean where they were offering boat rides to see all this from the water looking into the coast.

On this particular day, the times were not working out for us to take the tour, but we hung around the side for a while and just soaked in the beauty of the Pacific coastline on the edge of these gardens. We always feel like we’ll be back one day and we’ll take that boat ride since we kind of know our way through there now. We saw some perfectly manicured walls of green with arches cut out of them as doorways that led to different vignettes and themed gardens. That’s something I want to try one day. I am working on getting a wall of green at our house made out of Japanese Yews. They were planted about eight years ago and they are getting around 10 to 12 feet tall now and they are now touching creating a solid wall that I can start pruning tight probably by next year. I had not planned on making an arched doorway through there, but I might try that now that I’ve seen it. We checked our time and noticed that it was time to be on our way so we could make time and make it all the way up to Renfro, which is where we would stay for the remainder of the trip.

As I’ve said before, Mimi loves the game of finding a cool Airbnb to stay in when we take trips like a sport. I had seen pictures of the place she picked out, but I never could’ve imagined what we were going to see when we got there. I think I will start next week‘s article at that point because the place that we stayed in and the surrounding beaches are going to be worth writing about. I can tell you that we have fallen in love with this area and plan to go back when time allows. We will probably go just a little farther north next time where we have seen pictures of an area that appeals to us. I will be hoping that these spotty rain falls keep coming our way and keeping everyone’s plants alive and spirits bright. In the meantime keep yourself safe in this heat.