A garden from a mine pit

In Victoria Canada we were introduced to the most amazing gardens. These botanical gardens were started by the Butchart family years ago and remains in the family today. They require four full time gardeners to maintain them. The Butchart gardens are a combination of many gardens including a Japanese garden, rose garden and Spanish garden. The most impressive garden by far though was the Sunken garden and to go along with it's fantastic flowers it has an amazing story. The garden started as an open mining pit. The family Butchart was doing well and earning a lot of money from their mining operation but when the ore ran out they were left with an unsightly hole in the ground. The wife of the family didn't like that much so she started planting trees and flowers. Little by little the gardens grew and now you can't tell where the natural landscape stops and the garden begins.
I enjoyed the rose garden but wish we could have see it in bloom. They had hundreds of rose bushes all given by different countries in different years. The Japanese garden was pretty with all the statuary and shaped trees. They even had a couple of those cruved bridges you always see in pictures of Japan. They had an impressive fountain that would shot feet into the air and change shaped. It reminded me of the fountains a the Belogio in Las Vegas. They had a carousel there but we didn't have time for a ride unfortunately. Brian's favorite garden was the Sunken garden. It was by far the most impressive botanical we have seen.