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The Butchart Gardens | Food & Beverage for Butchart Gardens
Garden Tour | Open Gardens

The Butchart Gardens
Thursday, July 10, 2025

We plan to depart the Mary Winspear Centre for The Butchart Gardens at 5:00pm on Thursday, July 10, 2024. Our bus will travel approximately 25 minutes to Brentwood Bay where we will tour the gardens at our leisure throughout the evening. Around 120 years ago, before it was turned into a garden by Jenny Butchart, the area was actually a quarry! It is hard to imagine a limestone quarry here while you’re wandering around the gardens and surrounded by so many beautiful flowers. But if you look closely, you can still see remains of the cement plant that existed in the quarry nestled in amongst all of the flora. Butchart Gardens is now home to millions of plants, which cover the vast area. The gardens are 55 acres and home to over 900 species of plants!

What can you see and do at Butchart Gardens?

The Sunken Garden: This is the best place to imagine the original quarry hidden beneath millions of plants that make up the gardens. The walls of The Sunken Garden are covered in green plants, grasses, and mosses, but you can still see the shape of the quarry that started it all. There is a lookout point made of limestone that allows you to see all of The Sunken Garden, which is a great opportunity for photos! The Rose Garden: You will smell the rose garden before you see it. The amazing rose aroma is from 2,500 roses! You may have never seen so many roses in one place! Visiting the Rose Garden is truly like walking through a fairytale. This is where you will find the rose arches – one of the top photo spots!

The Italian Garden: The Italian Garden used to be a tennis court! It was transformed into a stunning Italian courtyard, complete with mouth-watering Italian gelato. If you ever feel like pretending you’re wandering around the Italian countryside while you’re on Vancouver Island, this is the place to go!

The Japanese Garden: After leaving the Italian countryside, you can step into a Japanese oasis. You enter the Japanese Garden through a Torii gate, which is a gate of traditional Japanese architecture that is usually at the entrance to shrines or spiritual places. It is said that these gates symbolically represent entering a sacred place. The Japanese Garden is the most serene area in Butchart Gardens, the perfect place to relax and reflect during a busy day of traveling. Rose Carousel: For children, this is a must-see! The Rose Carousel looks like something right out of a storybook. It has 30 hand-carved wooden animals from traditional carousel horses to polar bears! It’s $2 CAD per ride or you can grab a card good for 11 rides for $20 CAD.

July to August live entertainment: If you are a fan of live music and happen to be making a trip to Butchart Gardens during July or August, you should visit the gardens in the evening so that you can see the summer concerts! The performances begin at 8 pm and are a perfect way to cap off your trip to the gardens. The best part: you don’t have to pay extra to go! The cost of the concert is included in your admission to the gardens.

Night illuminations: Once darkness descends over Vancouver Island, the gardens transform into a beautiful display of light! However, think more subtle light display, and less Coachella rave light show. The way that the plants, trees, and water features are illuminated feels like art and is worth sticking around for after sunset.

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Food & Beverage Options for Butchart Gardens Tour

There are several food and beverage options available on-site at Butchart Gardens and in Sidney there are places that offer casual pre-made food to eat on the bus en route to the Gardens.

TAKE-OUT IN SIDNEY, BC

Sidney offers a wide range of restaurants, coffee shops and bakeries. Following are a few options that are within one block of the Mary Winspear Centre.

Mariner Village Mall - 9810 Seventh Street (corner of Beacon Avenue and Seventh Street). It is located across the street from the Mary Winspear Centre in between the Wyndham Days Inn Motel and Best Western Emerald Isle Motel and has the following options:

• Thrifty Foods grocery store deli department offers a variety of pre-made sandwiches, salads, and snacks. Made to order sandwiches and paninis are also available during most hours of operation.
• Subway Sandwich Shop offers a wide range of made to order sandwiches.

Save On Foods Grocery Store - 2345 Beacon Avenue (1 block east of Mary Winspear). It has a deli department with a limited selection of pre-made sandwiches, salads, and snacks.

Tim Horton’s Coffee Shop - 2343 Beacon Avenue (is beside Save On Foods). It offers a variety of made to order sandwiches and is also known for its iconic “Tim Bits” (mini donut holes available in a variety of flavors).

BUTCHART GARDENS ON-SITE FOOD SERVICES

The quickest onsite option for light and casual fare is the Coffee Shop. The Coffee Shop is open daily during operating hours, takeaway service is available. Centrally located in Waterwheel Square, the cozy coffee shop is where your garden stroll begins and ends. With convenient snacks and beverages to warm you up (or cool you down!), you will be able to watch the world walk by while you recharge. Click this Online Menu link for food and beverage options at the Coffee Shop.

The Blue Poppy Restaurant (not to be confused with the Butchart “Dining Room”) offers casual fare in the former greenhouse at Butchart Gardens. The large atrium style restaurant offers an open seating plan to enjoy casual fare, made with fresh, seasonal ingredients. They are open daily from 4:00pm - 8:00pm. Reservation are not taken, and seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Click this Online Seasonal Menu link for food and beverage options at the Blue Poppy Restaurant. Please note eating in or ordering takeout food from the Blue Poppy will take more time and cut into garden viewing time.

For something sweet, the Gelateria offers a selection of on-site made gelato and sorbet. What better way to top off your experience in the Italian Garden than with house-made Gelato? Eighteen flavors vary throughout the season and feature locally sourced ingredients. Their culinary team travelled to Italy specifically to learn how to make this delicious treat.

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Several gardens are included on the Saturday bus tour, with more gardens on the open gardens tour the next day. Although space is limited on the bus tour, any conference participant can enjoy the open gardens on Sunday.

Garden Tour
Saturday, July 12, 2025

Four gardens are on the Saturday bus tour. Two are large collection public gardens, and two are Victoria Lily Society members gardens. Space is limited on the bus tour.

Wanita Bickford’s garden is in Central Saanich. Wanita has a large garden in several beds around her house. The home is surrounded by agricultural fields and is blessed with full sun exposure and being tended by Wanita’s very green thumb. There is a large variety of perennial flowers in her garden including a diverse collection of lilies. Wanita is fortunate to have many un-named hybrids from the breeding work of VLS members Gordon Wallis and Bruce Richardson.

The Horticulture Centre of the Pacific in Saanich is our next stop. This 41 hectare public botanical garden is organized as a non-profit society with 16 staff, 170 volunteers, and 230 horticulture students looking after it’s numerous collections. We will focus on the Victoria Lily Society managed Lily Garden. This garden seeks to showcase as many different types of lilies as possible from small species to giant OT’s, and from early martagons to late Lilium speciosum. Our HCP lily garden expert Brenda Sopow will tour participants through this garden.

Government House Gardens in Victoria is our third stop on the tour. Government House is the office and official residence of British Columbia’s Lieutenant Governor. The 36-acre property is divided into 20+ gardens and a woodland. It is maintained by about 200 volunteer gardeners in ‘The Friends of Government House Gardens Society’. Sadly, it is not deer proof and lilies are scarce here but there are many other delectable horticultural beauties to see.

Our final stop is Jane Bailey's Oak Bay home, which is situated on a private waterfront lot in the scenic Uplands neighbourhood. The main garden is the west facing courtyard. It features a variety of perennials and shrubs, but the star attractions are the lilies and a large collection of roses which are another passion of Jane's. The waterfront side of the property overlooks Cadboro Bay and Ten Mile Point and has mainly been left in its natural state.

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Open Gardens
Sunday, July 13, 2025
9:00am - 12:00pm

We have organized three open gardens for Sunday morning, all of them are situated on the Saanich Peninsula, close to Sidney. Private transport will have to be used by those wishing to visit these gardens.

Colin Tamboline’s garden is a 1-acre property on a side hill in North Saanich dominated by a mature second growth forest of Douglas Fir, Arbutus and Garry Oak. The garden has several stairways and ramps to access its many garden rooms. It has a large two pond water feature, a still pond, and several terraces built with dry stack rock wall retaining walls. Areas have been left natural to highlight native plant species including erythroniums, dodecatheons, trilliums, licorice root ferns and moss. There is a rhododendron dell, a trillium dell, a rock garden and a diverse collection of lilies, daylilies, iris, and peonies grown in the terrace beds.

Sandy Joinson’s garden in Saanichton has evolved over a period of almost fifty years. Although smaller in scale the space has been utilized with a mix of perennials, shrubs and Japanese maples, roses and succulents. Sandy has tried to incorporate lilies into the mix in recent years. There is very little lawn, and many pots have been used to add more layers. The garden is in a subdivision within a rural area of the peninsula.

Louise Dixon’s property in Tanner Ridge is a ¾- acre garden with a variety of rhododendrons, lilies, a vegetable garden and water feature. Louise has a wide range of other perennials, shrubs and small trees which complement her feature plantings and add year-round interest.

Calvor Palmateer's garden is a blend of plants grown from seed and bought; he loves to hybridize plants. This garden starts with galanthus and cyclamen, and then moves onto trilliums, Pacific Coast Iris, and lilies. He also collects rare and interesting plants. The backyard has six very large Douglas Fir, so forest plants are grown there while in the front there is full sun with rock walls. Aloe polyphylla and Tropaeolum polyphyllum do well here. Palmateer also grows martagons in the back yard and most of the other lilies in the sunny front yard.

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