Looking down upon the lush greenery and riotous flower gardens in the sunken gardens at Butchart Gardens, it is almost impossible to believe that this was once a barren limestone quarry. In 1904, cement magnate Robert Butchart purchased the site and began to mine the native limestone in order to produce Portland cement for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
When the limestone was exhausted, Butchart’s wife, Jenny, began restoring the bleak pit, hauling in topsoil from a nearby farm and planting seeds that eventually transformed the quarry into one of the world’s premiere gardens. Today the only surviving portion of the original cement factory is the tall chimney of a long vanished kiln, seen at the upper right in the photo above.
