Saanich notes
These notes are from the Saanich peninsula, north of Victoria, where a worked-out limestone quarry became a garden and the inlet sits beside the road. I write them as walks. The place is for your feet.
Saanich is a low finger of Vancouver Island pointed at the mainland. Farms, Garry oak, Douglas fir, and a lot of water wrap a small amount of land. Brentwood Bay and Tod Inlet are the names I use when I mean the water nearest the garden.
Weather comes off the strait. Winters are wet and mild, and summers dry out enough that a gardener watches the soil. You can want a coat on the ridge and feel no wind at all once you are down in the quarry, on the same afternoon.
The garden is a sequence of paths, not a thing to finish. Quarry floor, perennial borders under the firs, rose arches, a Japanese pond, then the gate again. I am not interested in turning that into a schedule.
The pages after this one are the walks. The note in the middle is the shape of a whole day, and I put it there because the order of the hours matters more than a stack of room names. Read that one if you only read one.
A day here is a walk with a few real choices, not a list of rooms to finish. I start from the gate, I let the weather pick the first path, and I leave when the gravel has said enough.
The sunken garden is a quarry that became a floor of flowers. The Butchart family had this limestone pit, and when the stone was finished the garden began in the hole. You walk down into it now, and the walls are the oldest thing you can see.
The rose walk is arches, gravel, and the particular heat roses make when many of them are open at once. I come here for scent and for the tunnel the arches make, not for a lesson in varieties.
The Japanese garden is the quiet room. Moss, a bridge, a red maple, and water that does not ask you to keep moving. I go there when the roses have been enough noise.
Victoria is the harbour town south of the garden, and the region is why the two belong in one day. Peninsula, inlet, and inner harbour are one coast. The garden is a long walk set down in the middle of it.