I posted this message on the CompuServe Birding Forum. I thought I would re-post
it here to share my experience on a recent trip. Possibly some of the B.C. folks
here will have a differing perspecitve of Victoria's most famous feature.

Jerry Blinn

********************

Last week, Judy and I, with our daughter, son-in-law, and two kiddies, spent
the day at Butchart Gardens, a huge, many acre, formal garden in Victoria, B.C.
This place is visited by over a million people each year, and is one of the
major reasons Victoria is a great tourist destination. (Including a screaming,
high-speed catamaran service from Seattle, which we used, and which is great
fun, and the Empress Hotel, a truly wonderful 90 year old Canadian Pacific
hotel where we stayed - we were in the original section and even had a tower
and cupola in our room. I swear I saw the ghost of a princess hanging her hair
out the window <G>.)

Butchart Gardens is simply remarkable for its beauty and depth of botanical
content.

But, I hadn't been there a half hour before I realized that something was
missing. What was it? A huge void in the experience. What?

Suddenly, it dawned on me. I was surrounded by a billion blossoms, in full sun,
and there was NOT ONE BUTTERFLY anywhere!!! (Later, I saw maybe a dozen
Swallowtails for the hours we spent there.) There were practically no birds --
just a very few swallows, a few Robins, and I saw one very skittish female
warbler of some kind in the understory. I carried my binos, and used them maybe
four times - even as I wandered off into relatively uncharted areas. Swallows
were in great evidence - in fact in huge swarms -- just ~outside~ the garden
boundaries.

Then, looking closely at the plants, I had to literally search whole beds of
plants to find a leaf that had insect damage. And in those searches I never saw
a bug or a slug. And, suddenly, there was another dawning. There were NO
BEES!!!! among the billion blossoms. Well, I saw maybe six during those hours.

In other words, it's very clear that Butchart uses tons of insecticides to
create a beautiful ABSOLUTELY STERILE garden. It's the closest thing to a
plastic garden that I can imagine.

The plants are beautiful because virtually every other living thing has been
poisoned to death - unless somebody knows of some supernatural gardening
techniques that I'm not aware of, or if Butchart hires legions of people who go
out in the dark of night and pick the bugs off the plants, out of the ground,
and out of the air.

The most information we could get about chemical use there is that they use
fungicides every seven to ten days on their roses. I have no actual information
about their insecticide use, so my remarks are supposition based on the nearly
total absence of bugs and birds.

Now, I think everybody should visit Victoria. And I have no problem visiting
Butchart Gardens - it's a remarkable place. But the negative experience re:
"animal" life should not be overlooked.

Jerry


E-mail from: Jerry Blinn, 21-Jun-1997