Hundreds of pastel flowers, an exquisite Japanese garden, a quarry of unparalleled grandeur, and all within one garden? Michael McCoy can hardly believe it either. Welcome to Canada’s Butchart Gardens.

For me, the recurring and truly compelling image of The Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island, Canada, even long before I ever visited, was of old Mrs Butchart, suspended in a sling hanging over the precipitous cliff-faces of the quarry, tucking in young plants of ivy, wherever they might fit. She may not have been anything like as old as I imagine when that happened, but I’ve constructed her to be one of those incredible old ladies that only get more and more determined and achieving in advancing age. (Incidentally, why do you see so many women like that, and so few men?)

Ross Garden Tours went to Butchart in June, which is the first month of summer in the northern hemisphere. It isn’t, however, the equivalent of our December. Its more like our October or November in its spring freshness, overlaid with the intoxicating and expansive sense of growth and vigour that only seems to accompany gardens in very cold areas with a brief annual growing season. June is the season of peonies, which are undoubtedly the most voluptuous of all garden flowers. It is the time of fox tail lilies, with tall, perfectly tapering spikes made up of hundreds of pastel flowers, and the time of blue poppies, which leave you staring in disbelief at this rarest of hues. The delphiniums are at their towering best in June, sending rich purple and sky-blue way overhead with impossibly stout clubs of flower. They are grown in their hundreds in the Butchart rose garden, and when you are amongst them, you are deeply amongst them. Indeed, this is perhaps the real power of this garden – its ‘depth’.

You are never more deeply surrounded in this garden than when in Mrs Butchart’s quarry garden. The trees still seem quite young, at least in the prime of life, and are yet to be really enveloping. What is enveloping is the height of those dramatic quarry walls, which seem to capture and hold the deliciously green lawns that sit flat as a lake at their base. Many gardens have to wait for years to achieve such a strong sense of enclosure, as most have to rely on trees to provide it.

The quarry garden is also wonderfully rich in textures. Shrubs and trees when left alone tend to be pretty shapeless, and fuzzy in outline. At Butchart, some have both their shape and outline enhanced by clipping, and others are left well alone. The result is a seriously exaggerated texture, with stiff and tightly clipped yew, for instance, contrasting with large weeping Japanese maples that billow and ripple in the breeze.

Amongst all this is the screaming colour of annuals, changed several times a season. There is a certain jewel-like quality of colour here that you rarely, if ever, see matched in Australian gardens. It may be a matter of the quality of light, which is much gentler than ours, or the contrast with the deep emerald lawns, or even the fact that you can stand above it all and look down into it, which is always compelling. Whatever it is, I can’t help being reminded that this sort of colour – this ‘decorating’ – always looks best in a setting that could work nearly as well without it. Colour alone can’t alter the essential ‘feel’ of a garden, but is a great bonus to a garden that is pleasing on every other level.

As a garden lover who secretly harbours the view that gardens and gardening will win out over all other fleeting pleasures, there’s something really reassuring in the irony that Mr Butchart’s substantial wealth, made in the concrete industry, must have since been entirely eclipsed by the fame and fortune of Mrs Butchart’s amazing creation. While he played around making money, she got on with the really serious business of making a garden.

As the quarry garden steals all the promotional limelight at Butchart, I had never seen pictures of the Japanese gardens at Butchart, and didn’t know what to expect. I had mental images of bad copies of stone lanterns and bamboo water features. The truth was pleasantly surprising, if not particularly Japanese. The Japanese garden is more of a woodland garden, and full of the really desirable plants that love this cool, moist climate. Here there are clumps of blue poppy, and enormous hostas amongst repeated domes of deciduous ferns at the very peak of spring freshness. There are swathes of Japanese water iris amongst the feathery plumes of astilbe. Again texture and plant form play a key role with weird, tightly clipped forms of conifer and box-leafed honeysuckle looking like solid ‘brain’ coral amongst all the soft, luxuriant growth of perennials. Strong form is also provided by the use of shrubs with emphatic horizontal branching, such as Viburnum plicatum ‘Tomentosum’, and the much rarer Cornus contraversa ‘Variegata’. The latter’s so-called common name – the Wedding Cake tree – makes it sound both common and suburban, when it is neither. This plant’s great boast is that it layers all its very horizontal branches to form a distinctly tiered effect like no other plant in the plant kingdom.

One of the tricks to this sort of rich woodland planting, achieved perfectly at Butchart, is to make sure that the canopy overhead is not too dense, so the shade is lively and dappled. Smaller trees of a very open canopy are used repeatedly. Once the shade is too dense, the range of plants that will grow as ground cover becomes severely limited.