Horticulture Centre of the Pacific in Victoria, BC

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Everyone talks about the Butchart Gardens in Victoria. It’s a huge tourist attraction and for sure very profitable at an admission fee of $33.10 + 15% tax. It attracts a massive stream of visitors, buses full of tourists, huge parking lots.
And even as a senior, arriving 45 minutes before they close in the afternoon, full admission is demanded, no half-day pass or senior discount...

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The Horticulture Centre of the Pacific (HPC)
However, there is a hidden gem among the West Coast public gardens that is visited mostly by garden professionals and locals. For just $5, you can enter this magical horticultural gem any day except during Christmas time (Dec 18 - Jan 6).

HCP is located in Saanich, a north-west suburb of Victoria, British Columbia - not too far from the Butchart Gardens.  The Horticulture Centre of the Pacific (HCP) is all about plants - period.  It doesn’t boast a luxurious restaurant, gift shop or multi-media visitor center and is void of ten-thousands of visitors per day.
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Lose yourself among its 40 hectares, 2.4 of which are divided into 24 demonstration and teaching gardens showing more than 10,000 varieties of plants:

Bees, Birds and Butterflies Garden
Children's Garden
Dahlia Trial Garden
Doris Page Winter Garden
Drought Tolerant Garden
Ground cover Garden
Hardy Fuchsia Garden
Heather Garden
Herb Garden
Lily Garden
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Mixed Perennial Beds & Mixed Borders
Native Plant Demonstration Garden
Native Plant Restoration Area
An Orchard
Ornamental Grass Garden
Rhododendron and a Hosta Garden
Rose Garden
Takata Garden
Vegetable Garden
Water Feature Garden
Woodland Garden
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A graceful bridge in the cool green refuge, spans the Takata Japanese garden, with ferns, irises and ornamental grasses providing a foliage counterpoint. A 12-by-18-meter Zen Garden will be added soon.
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The garden design staff here is small, but an army of students help to maintain the gardens, part of the HCP's 10-month-long accredited diploma course in landscape maintenance. Did I mention the warm and cozy coffee-shop with its patio, the library or the lovely gift shop?

Horticulture Centre of the Pacific

505 Quayle Rd. Victoria,

British Columbia V8X 3X1
http://hcp.ca/gardens_hcp/

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Dogs on leashes are permitted.
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Another Hidden Gem for Plant Lovers in Victoria, BC
…and a beautiful oasis on the edge of University of Victoria’s campus:
Discover UVic's Finnerty Woodland Gardens, a space for students, staff, faculty and the community to reflect and be inspired. Get their self-guided walking tour as a pdf from their website and watch a short video.

Discover Also Two Unique Trees: 
Camellia:
A long-lived broadleaf evergreen shrub, growing everywhere on Vancouver Island. Flowers, from bright white to deep red, come in 6 forms: single, semi-double, double rose, anemone, peony and formal double. Here they do best with some protection from cold winds and partial or light shade.

Liquidambar (Sweet Gum):
A late spring foliage tree, it is one of the finest trees for long-lasting and consistently brilliant fall color.  Liquidambar is an attractive, versatile tree - hardiness zones 5 to 9 in full sun - with maple-like foliage.  Liquidambar does require additional moisture during prolonged summer dry spells.  Speaking of Maple tree leaves: On Vancouver Island, they are as large as dinner plates!

Finnerty Gardens is free and open to the public year-round. It is located north of Cedar Hill Cross Road and west of Henderson Road.  Look out for busses to the UVic - or if drive, the Parking lot #6 is closest to Finnerty Gardens. The entrance to the gardens is near the Interfaith Chapel, on the south-west edge of the campus.  A great time to visit is during the Rhododendron bloom.

Whether you're a bird watcher, gardener, botanist or just seeking a 

lovely place to walk, these quiet gardens are perfect for enjoying nature. 

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Colourful Winter Flowers in NW Florida

Spanish explorers named the new-found part of North America “Pascua Florida”, which means Flowery Easter" or "Flowering Easter”. But it is not only flowering in Florida on Easter, rather all year-round!  

Wintertime is never bleak in Florida, even in the North-West, around the “Emerald Coast” and the “Forgotten Coast”, between Pensacola and Apalacicola.

Here are just a couple impressions, photos I took between November and the end of February.

More plants can be found in the lovely botanical gardens in Florida, such as the one in Sarasota, New Smyrna, Pensacola or Clearwater.  To visit garden centers is a blast too! They are chockfull of lovely blooms that we can only admire in the North between June and September.

Last but not least it’s interesting to see abundant blooms and shrubs that are growing in the wild, and usually sold for top dollars in Canada and the Northern States.  

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Create Your Own Organic Fertilizer

The Key to a Good Garden is Good Soil. 

Most of the essential nutrients for plants are found in soil.  What flowers, vegetables, and trees need to thrive is Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, and to a lesser extent Calcium, Magnesium, and Sulphur.  To provide these nutrients to your plants you don’t need to spend any money, save your time and gas to head to the garden center.  Organic fertilizers are way more efficient and helpful to your plants than the artificial ones you buy for top dollars!  Go no further than your pantry, backyard (or the beach) for materials to make your own organic fertilizer.  You can prepare your own bloom or fruit fertilizer year-round:

Fermented Fruits are Prolific Garden Helpers. 

Don’t throw away brown bananas, wilted salad leaves, rotten apples or moldy strawberries!  Not only do they contain valuable Phosphorus and Potassium, they also have the fruit growth enzymes and hormones that encourage the plant to utilize the resources it has to produce large blooms and delicious fruits.  
Add approximately 10% sugar or molasses and water to let the mixture ferment to a mash for a week or so.  Cover it well and place it in the garage or garden shed to avoid the smell in the kitchen. In winter let all your kitchen scraps freeze in a big container that is safely secured, such a garbage can with a well-secured lid.  Place a large stone on top and fasten the lid with a jumpy band to avoid critters’ rummaging.

Wellness Cure for Your Garden:

BANANAS or Banana PEELS  –  Use over-ripe Bananas from your kitchen or those that are offered at very low prices in the produce section of your grocery store.  Roses love potassium too.  Simply throw one or two peels in the hole before planting or bury peels under mulch so they can compost naturally. Get bigger and more blooms and a bomber crop of vegetables.

COFFEE GROUNDS  

Acid and nitrogen-loving plants such as tomatoes, blueberries, roses and azaleas like coffee grounds mixed into the soil. Visit your next Starbucks and bring two buckets with you to let it fill with used coffee grounds. Sprinkle it on top of the soil and fork it well in before watering. 

EGG SHELLS 

Crash the eggshells in very small pieces, and work them well into the soil near tomatoes and peppers. The calcium helps fend off blossom end rot. Eggshells are 93% calcium carbonate, the same ingredient as lime, a tried and true soil amendment! 

SEAWEED – Fresh seaweed needs to be washed before mixing it into the compost/soil to remove salt.  Another benefit of using seaweed fertilizer over time is that it slightly acidifies and adds iron to the soil, which is great news if you are growing acid and iron hungry plants, such as Azaleas, Gardenias, Camellias, and Rhododendrons.  Shred or chop up the seaweed into 1- or 2-inch-long pieces.  While chopped seaweed takes only a few weeks to decompose, seaweed that's left whole can take approximately six months to compost.

Famous Painters and Their View of Gardens

Claude Monet
Monet's ambition was to document the French countryside. From 1883 Monet, the founder of the Impressionism, lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works.

In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life. The Metropolitan Museum in New York shows shows the famous Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies.

Charles Courtney Curran
One of his paintings was shown at the The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887-1920 - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Focused on the period 1887-1920, The Artist's Garden the 2015 exhibition told the story of American Impressionist artists and the growing popularity of gardening as a middle-class leisure pursuit at the turn of the 20th century. The Philadelphia area was the center of the publishing industry in the early 1900s, which led to the creation of magazines aimed at middle class suburban gardeners like House and Garden, founded in 1901 in Philadelphia.

Vincent van Gogh
One of several paintings of Irises by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, and one of a series of paintings he executed at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the last year before his death in 1890. Van Gogh started painting Irises within a week of entering the asylum, in May 1889, working from nature in the hospital garden.
The original painting can be seen at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California.

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