Butchart Gardens
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Near Victoria, British Columbia: Jennie Butchart, who began gardening here in 1904, turned her husband's exhausted limestone quarry into the flower-filled Sunken Garden (completed 1921); today a National Historic Site of Canada.
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Quick answers
Where is Butchart Gardens?
Butchart Gardens is in Canada.
Butchart Gardens is a famous flower garden in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, Canada, near Victoria on Vancouver Island. It is visited by more than a million people each year and is a National Historic Site of Canada.
It began in a worn-out limestone quarry. Robert Pim Butchart made Portland cement near the site, and when the limestone ran out in 1909, his wife Jennie began turning the pit into a garden. The Sunken Garden was finished in 1921. The Butchart family still owns the gardens. In 2024 they employed 50 full-time gardeners to look after the grounds and 26 greenhouses. The globe marks it as a garden on Vancouver Island.
From quarry to garden
The Butcharts came to the west coast of Canada for the rich limestone needed to make cement. In 1904 they set up a home near the quarry on Tod Inlet and named it Benvenuto, Italian for 'welcome'.
Over the years more gardens followed: an Italian garden in 1926 where the tennis courts had been, and in 1929 a large rose garden in place of the kitchen vegetable garden. A Japanese garden was designed by Isaburo Kishida, a designer from Yokohama who worked in Victoria between 1907 and 1912.
A family project
In 1939 the couple gave the gardens to their grandson Ian Ross on his 21st birthday. He ran them until his death 58 years later, and his son Christopher then took over. Since 2001 the owner and managing director has been the Butcharts' great-granddaughter Robin-Lee Clarke.
For the 50th anniversary in 1953, miles of underground wiring were laid for night lighting. The Ross Fountain was added in 1964, and two 30-foot totem poles marked the 100th anniversary in 2004.
Things to find
Mr. Butchart loved birds, keeping a parrot in the house, ducks in the Star Pond and peacocks on the lawn. Look for the bronze wild boar called Tacca, a copy of a 1620 statue. Visitors rub its snout for luck, and it has become shiny.
The Rose Garden has 2,500 plants of 280 kinds. The Rose Carousel, opened in 2009, is the only carousel on Vancouver Island and has thirty animals, from bears to zebras.
Fun facts
- Its famous Sunken Garden was created by Jennie Butchart in a worked-out limestone quarry, starting in the early 1900s.
- The garden's design inspired the gardens of the Canadian pavilion at Epcot in Florida, opened in 1982.
- The bronze boar named Tacca has a shiny snout because so many visitors rub it for luck.
- The Rose Garden has 2,500 plants from 280 varieties of roses.
- The Butchart home was called Benvenuto, which means 'welcome' in Italian.
On the globe
The model shows the sunken flower garden and its paths inside the old quarry, on Vancouver Island.
Nearby on the globe
Sources
Updated: 2026-10-14