If you’re a fan of flowers and visiting Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) then you definitely must go visit Butchart Gardens, especially in the summer when all the gardens are in full bloom. If you’re a flower fanatic, it would be worth a trip to Victoria from Vancouver! I remember visiting Butchart Gardens in the summers, as a child (too young to appreciate nature but I remember the rose garden was impressive) and walking until my legs felt like they were going to fall off. So, my brothers and I decided we should subject our children to the wonders of walking vast distances. OOPS, I mean showing our children the wonder and beauty of plants and flowers. The only ‘problem’ was that I took my family back home during early spring (still kind of cold, sunny but chilly) there weren’t that many gardens in full bloom but there were enough in bloom or about to bloom to keep things interesting. Plus it was nice not having crowds of people all over the place and made it easy to keep track of everyone (for those goofy family photos). It was especially nice to let the younger kiddos wander on their own and still being able to keep an eye on them.

A lot of the buildings still look the same as when I used to visit, decades ago, and all the “iconic” statues that I remember were still there. The park is actually bigger than what I remember, I thought it would seem smaller since I’ve grown and my strides are much longer, but no, we still walked until my legs felt like falling off. Then again, it could be old age or the weight of my backpack full of camera gear. I’m pretty sure there are more garden display and fountain areas than before because due to time constraints, we didn’t even get to walk through them all and we had absolutely no recollection of some areas within the park. We even found an indoor carousel that wasn’t there when I was a kid, not fair, lol. There are benches and rock ledges spread sparsely around this dog friendly park but I didn’t notice that many so if you need a break and see a rest area, take it.

Although there weren’t as many flowers to marvel at, we still had a blast reminiscing and recreating past photos. During one of our ‘messing around, reminiscing’ sessions at one of the statues, we were told by some fellow park goers (yearly members) that Butchart Garden’s is even more beautiful and fun in the winter, when there’s snow! Anyways, we had to cut the messing around to a minimum as we still had a lot to see in the park and other sites in Victoria, like the Craigdarroch Castle (which I wrote about in this post). We only had the long weekend to spend in Victoria as everyone else had to be back to work.

If you get hungry there’s a tea house and restaurant, sadly I’ve never been inside either one, maybe next time. Maybe next time I’ll get better images of the gardens because I won’t be too busy messing around and taking pictures of us messing around (it was a consensus that I’m not allowed to post those photos, lol). There is also a huge gift shop where they sell all the usual gift shop type stuff but what was amazing was the huge variety of seeds you can buy to plant in your own garden. I’m not sure if they sell seeds for all the plants and flowers you can find in the park, but it looked possible, from the sheer number of different seed packets I saw.

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Thanks for viewing and best wishes,

Ray

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