In season

Neil Ross on Canada’s unabashedly bright Butchart Gardens

iIn every public garden, there are ideas you can steal and use in your own modest backyard

s it possible to be too enthusiastic, too exuberant? If you stay up late and watch those infomercials selling everything from bras to blenders, the answer would have to be a resounding yes, with all those saccharine smiles and the claptrap that rarely delivers. Some plants and gardens can be the same – just too flamboyant and larger than life than is easily digestible.

At least, that’s how I felt when I first visited Canada in my twenties and pretty much every train station and bus stop was plastered with posters proclaiming the wonders of the Butchart Gardens – the country’s horticultural take on Disneyland. All those colour-enhanced images of massed bedding clothing the floor of an old quarry in psychedelic swirls left me cold. Besides, time was tight and I wanted to see Canada’s quieter, natural flora, its mountains and above all its bears. So, not on that trip. But last year took me on a return visit to see relatives on Vancouver Island, and it seemed rude not to give these iconic gardens on their doorstep a second chance.

The gardens were created by the Butchart family, largely between 1906 and 1929. Robert Butchart initially brought his family to Tod Inlet to quarry out the rich seams of limestone for his cement business. But once the rock was exhausted, his enterprising wife Jennie set about transforming the bruised landscape into a flower garden, excavating lakes and bringing in topsoil by horse and cart to make the desert bloom. It’s sort of a forerunner to the Eden project in England, where an abandoned clay pit has been turned into a beautiful oasis.

The Butchart family still runs the estate and has, since that initial vision, expanded the entertainment to include amphitheatres for concerts, an ice rink, night lighting and fireworks shows to bring in the visitors year-round. I joined the queues, shuffling along the crazy-paving paths wearing sunglasses – as much to cope with the intensity of the flowers as the sunshine.