Abkhazi Garden - the garden that love built

I've often thought that love and devotion are the two ingredients that separate unique gardens from fine ones; without them, knowledge and skill only produce superficial beauty that seldom resonates with our inner thoughts and emotions. So when a garden touches one's heart with its grace and beauty midst the leafless, numbing cold of late November, it is a sure sign that these two ingredients were abundant while it was created.

The story of the Abkhazi Garden in Victoria, British Columbia spans over seven decades, four countries and three continents. It is an exquisite tribute to the love and lives of its builders, Prince and Princess Abkhazi, who had originally met and learnt to know each other while living in Paris in the 1920s. Prince Nicolas Abkhazi had lost her home when his home became the Soviet state of Georgia, and lived in exile in Paris. Princess Abkhazi, or Peggy Pemberton Carter before her marriage, had grown up in Shanghai with wealthy adoptive parents, and she had been taken to Paris to learn more about European arts and culture. Her adoptive mother didn't want lose her to any suitor, prince or not, so Peggy was promptly transported back to Shanghai.

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18 years exchange of letters was followed by a further separation caused by the Second World War, during which Peggy was imprisoned by the Japanese and Nicolas by the Germans. In 1946, both met again in New York and decided to marry briefly thereafter. The couple moved together to Victoria in Canadian British Columbia, where Peggy had bought a small but promising lot on a hilly slope filled with glacial cliffs. Soon they started to build their garden together. The couple remained childless and Peggy later admitted that the garden became the child they never got.

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The Abkhazi garden soon became known for its exquisite plant collections and creative, artistic solutions that enhanced the natural, intricate beauty of the hilly site. Today, walking through the garden, moss-covered stone outcroppings reveals carefully installed, meandering pathways, and little ponds that mirror the clouds floating above, connecting the land to the sky. Every little crevice is filled with well-chosen alpines, bulbs and miniature conifers; below the cliffs, a lush grove of Rhododendrons, now with stems thick as thighs, spread their limbs above the accompanying woodland perennials. Thoughtfulness and calm seem to penetrate every corner of the garden, and there is a remarkable balance between the dramatic site and its planted companions. After Nicolas' and Peggy's deaths in the 1990s, high-density housing development threatened the gardens, but luckily some passionate garden lovers together with the Land Conservancy of British Columbia were able to rescue them.

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A garden is a perpetual reminder that there are no shortcuts to the important things in life, wrote Peggy, Princess Abkhazi, once in her journals. No shortcuts were taken in the Abkhazi Garden, so lovingly and devotedly built over 40 years by Nicolas and Peggy who had experienced both ultimate splendour and extreme misery during their long lives. And so it became one of those unique gardens that are able to touch one's heart, even over a decade after its creators finally left its stone-clad, mossy hills and shadowy groves.

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'The garden that love built' was a description that Peggy herself used of their garden.

A classical Chinese scholar's garden in Vancouver

View from the outer garden towards the Jade water pavilion and the Magnolia courtyard, the dark water reflecting the shapes of the buildings and the weeping willow.

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During a brief visit to Vancouver in British Columbia last weekend, I finally got to see Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese garden that I had been curious about for some time. Named to honor of the first president of the Republic of China who also has been called the father of modern China, it was built for 24 years ago as a full-scale replica of a classical scholar's garden, using materials, tools and techniques that were almost identical to those used centuries ago.

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View from the Magnolia courtyard towards the outer garden.

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Despite the grey, hanging Vancouver skies above and the busy commerce behind the surrounding high white walls so typical for classical Chinese gardens, my stroll around the garden seemed to transfer me to another time and place, where a whiff of orchid scent or a gentle stroke of a calligraphy brush could be contemplated for hours.

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The Jade water pavilion and covered walkways seen from the inner Maple hall courtyard; sitting places were important for the delicate Chinese upperclass ladies who could barely walk with their tiny, bound feet.*

Inside the Jade water pavilion, two latticed wooden screens, constructed without any nails or screws, frame views to both outer and inner gardens. The screens, a circular one called Heaven gate (above) and a square Earth gate, illustrate the Daoist yin and yang found throughout the garden: light is balanced by dark, rugged and hard by soft and flowing, and small by large.

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Gliding through the moon gates and latticed pavilion openings, the garden never revealed itself all at one glance, but was presented as a series of carefully orchestrated vistas, like miniature landscapes and scenes of a scroll painting. Even the white walls, wood, stone and plants kept to the same subtle color scheme of muted greys, browns and greens.

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Despite its small size, all key elements of a classical Chinese garden could be found within this garden. Buildings - terraces, covered walkways, pavilions and lookout platforms - were all meticulously built without any nails and screws. Sculptural, pitted and convoluted Tai Hu limestone rocks were bought from Lake Tai near Suzhou. All plants had been carefully selected for their specific symbolic values; often, only one specimen of each plant was used as a way to heighten the sense of its particularity and distinctiveness, and for its place in the circle of seasons, adding to the experience of time passing within the closed, high walls. A pond with cloudy water created a tranquil atmosphere, reflecting the buildings, rocks and plants, and small notes with calligraphic signs offered inspiring words of poetry to those able to decipher their meanings.

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The courtyards were covered by intricate stonework, created of pebbles and rocks that were cut by hand.

In a serene, connected courtyard with a study, I could easily imagine the scholar reading, writing, composing poetry and music, and painting on his elegant wooden desk; in China, the art of gardening was always inseparable from other forms of art. Behind the desk, three framed windows depicted scenes with the "three friends of winter" - bamboo symbolizing resiliency amid diversity, pine symbolizing strength and eternity, and winter-flowering plum standing for rebirth and renewal - all important symbols in the life of a classical Chinese scholar.

View from the Scholar's courtyard into the study; the scholar's table and chair are seen in the middle, with one of the "three friends of winter" windows behind.

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Wandering around the garden, I thought of the many Japanese gardens that I've seen, both in Japan and in many other countries (most botanical and public gardens seem to think it is necessary to provide a Japanese garden, wherever in world they are situated). But Chinese gardens are much more rare; even in the Western coast of North America, where Chinese immigrants have formed an important part of the population since mid-1850s, only a handful of them exist, all in cities with historic Chinatowns like San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver and soon even Seattle.

Contemplating this disparity, I thought that maybe it is their reliance on often highly ornate architecture that made Chinese gardens so difficult to lift out of their context, while the sophisticated simplicity and conceived naturalness of the Japanese ones (successfully falling together with the 20th century ideals of Modernism) made them to object of our eager imitation even if the results are often mediocre at their best...?

The scholar's courtyard with Tai Hu river rocks from Lake Tai in China. These rocks were extremely popular in classical Chinese gardens, and their forms invite to different interpretations as the light changes during the days and seasons. The "leak window" behind leads the eye to something beyond, at the same time expanding the space.

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Anyhow, I enjoyed greatly my initiation into the art of Chinese gardening, having so far experienced it only through art and in books. Certainly, I would be very happy to travel to China for that special experience that only seeing gardens in their original landscapes and contexts can give, but until that lucky day, I'll have some enjoyable days in front of me visiting the Chinese gardens of the West Coast. Which reminds me of words of Yuan Ye, a classic Chinese gardening manual published in 1634 that explained the benefits of private garden as following:

If one can thus find stillness in the midst of city turmoil, why should one then forego such an easily accessible spot and seek a more distant one? As soon as one has some leisure time then one can go and wander there, hand in hand with a friend.

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I took all photos above; please don't copy without asking my permission - contact me through leaving a comment.

The Butchart Gardens

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Being "Thanksgiving orphans", as our American friends called us, is not a completely negative thing; it leaves you to do whatever you want during these traditional family gathering times. We opted for a long weekend in Victoria on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia in Canada. I had visited Victoria once before when I was five years old with my parents and siblings, so I felt quite nostalgic, seeing before my eyes all the old family photos, with three young children dressed in typical 70's clothes skipping around in the gardens of Vancouver Island. One of them, the Butchart Gardens, has after all these years become something of a family legend, and I don't know how much I really remember or how much I just think I remember after seeing the pictures for so many times. Anyway, I was very keen on a new visit, or maybe a "reality check" of the gardens, more than 30 years later.

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The sunken garden in the old limestone quarry.

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The Butchart Gardens consists of 22ha (55 acres) of differently themed gardens, restaurants, shops and other entertainments. They are a well-known tourist attraction and receive more than a million visitors each year. The gardens were first created as a part of the Butchart family home, but already by the 1920s more than fifty thousand people came each year to see them, many of whom by car (this gives a hint of how prosperous this part of the world must have been then!).

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The Butcharts were, what could be called the nouveau-riche of their time; Robert Pim Butchart was a former dry goods merchant who became a highly successful pioneer in the cement manufacturing industry in North America. The West Coast of Canada had rich limestone deposits that are vital for cement production, so he built a factory at Tod Inlet on Vancouver Island and in 1904, established a home there with his family. As the lime deposits were exhausted in the quarry near their house, his wife, Jennie, decided to turn the enormous hole in the ground into a sunken garden, much in vogue during that time. An old black-and-white film in the visitors centre showed this operation, where thousands of tons of top soil were brought in by horse and cart and used to line the floor of the abandoned quarry. It was quite amusing to imaging all the fun they must have had, playing around like this, doing what they loved with their newly-earned money.

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Reflecting their world travels, the Butcharts added a Japanese Garden in 1908 and an Italian Garden some years later. A Rose Garden replaced a large kitchen vegetable patch in 1929. In 1939, the Butcharts gave the Gardens to their grandson Ian Ross (1918–1997) on his 21st birthday. Ross was involved in the operation and promotion of the gardens until his death 58 years later; the ownership of the gardens remains within the Butchart family. In 2004, the gardens were designated as a national historic site.

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From the Japanese Garden; the wet climate of Vancouver Island is perfect for growing moss.

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All this adds up to the central experience of the gardens now; they are a huge business, meticulously maintained and orchestrated to serve the masses visiting them every year. Just driving in to the large and well-organized car park gives a feeling of what is to come; then passing through the shops and entertainment areas, now lavishly trimmed with Christmas decorations of all kinds and colours, rips off the hope of seeing something personal or individual. The gardens are still beautiful, even in the middle of a dark November day; the sunken garden is still as amazing a gardening idea as it was for a hundred years ago. But I really would have hoped that all the kitsch would have been left out (I am leaving it out from my blog, well aware that it changes the impression you get as a reader). Of course, the gardens were designed to impress from the beginning, but is there such a need to overdo it? The gardens should be left to tell their story, unusual and eccentric as they are, and I am sure (or I hope...) that garden visitors still would come in thousands to see the impressing floral displays in their wonderfully beautiful natural environment.

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Oh, I could not resist - the giant sized Three French hens from the Twelwe Days of Christmas displays found in the gardens in December. What a delight...?