We are definitely going to visit Butchart Gardens on our watercolor journaling workshop to Victora this coming April. I have been doing some research on Butchart Gardens and discovered it has a history based on the insistence of a wife! You can read the whole story here http://www.seniorlivingmag.com/article/butchart-gardens-over-100-years-in-bloom Or you can read my abridged version below.

It seems cement was new on the horizon and a Scotsman living in Canada, Robert Butchart (who was one of 11 children) got interested in the process. He had married an American adventuress, Jeanette Foster Kennedy. She loved ballooning, flying, horseback riding and painting. In 1903, Bob Butchart heard of huge deposits of powdery white limestone, ideal for cement production, on Vancouver. The couple moved to a 3 room cottage overlooking the the limestone quarries and set up a cement making business.. Jeanette thought her husband was making a big mess of the view from the cottage, so she took the piles of clay and sand left over from the cement processing and moulded them into the gentle slopes that now form the Upper Garden. Then she planted some seeds........

The rest is history and the gardens are now world renown. Best of all we will get to visit them and if we want more tea after already having tea at the Empress Hotel, we will also imbibe on some tea and sandwiches in the shop in the gardens.