Butchart Gardens, Victoria, British Columbia
AA-2026-0CF02E
On the image
Someone spent decades turning an exhausted limestone quarry into this, and by the 1960s the transformation had become one of the most photographed acts of penance in North American horticulture. The stone staircase descending the old quarry wall exists because a cement magnate's wife decided a hole in the ground needed forgiving, and forgiveness, it turned out, required several thousand bedding plants replaced twice a year.
The two figures on the lawn path are doing what visitors here have always done, which is walk slowly and look slightly overwhelmed, the correct response to a garden designed so that no sightline repeats itself. Someone in a plaid skirt pauses near the roses as though deciding whether the begonias are worth the extra ten minutes; they always are, which is the entire business model.
Even the shadows have been landscaped, the dark ornamental tree on the right positioned less by accident than by a century of gardeners who understood that a view needs one thing you cannot quite see into.
The historian's note
The Butchart Gardens, on Vancouver Island near Victoria, British Columbia, occupy a former limestone quarry that supplied a cement plant operated by Robert Pim Butchart beginning in 1904. His wife, Jennie Butchart, began planting the depleted quarry pit around 1909, creating what became known as the Sunken Garden, and the estate opened progressively to public visitors through the early twentieth century.
By the 1960s the gardens had become an established tourist destination for visitors arriving via Victoria and the Inner Harbour, drawing on the growing postwar culture of scenic automobile and steamship travel through the Pacific Northwest. The stone stairways and terraced quarry walls visible here are original quarry features retained and planted over rather than removed, a deliberate reclamation approach unusual for its era.
The gardens remained under family ownership through the twentieth century and are recognized as a National Historic Site of Canada, valued both for their horticultural design and as an early example of industrial land reclamation for public amenity.
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The Sunken Garden, Butchart Gardens, Victoria, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-0CF02E. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-sunken-garden-butchart-gardens-victoria-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20260CF02E,
title = {The Sunken Garden, Butchart Gardens, Victoria, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-0CF02E},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-sunken-garden-butchart-gardens-victoria-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - The Sunken Garden, Butchart Gardens, Victoria, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-0CF02E UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-sunken-garden-butchart-gardens-victoria-1960s ER -
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