The following are a sampling of Victoria's world famous private gardens. To arrange a personalized tour of these gardens please feel free to contact Victorian Garden Tours
A half-acre urban garden created by a dynamic lady who is an active member of Victoria's gardening community. She designed and maintains this garden that has been designed for four-season interest (this garden placed first in a national competition for best year round garden design). Although there is a unity of the design in the garden, each of the mixed borders has its own distinct character ranging from woodland to Mediterranean to a rockery in full sun. Throughout there are harmonious colour combinations with an emphasis on foliage and texture as well as bloom. This garden is never static; the owner is constantly seeking out the best varieties, and incorporating newly introduced plants. (See trends section for information on her hellebore collection and companion plantings). Here you will find young choice trees that have been incorporated into the boarders with plans for the future.
This unique terraced garden, overlooking the ocean, has been designed to cope with a southern exposure and strong winds. Fragrant textured layering of sedums, succulents, s, grasses, and a myriad of other drought tolerant perennials and shrubs. With the terra cotta accents, the antique wine press, the soft gray foliage and the drifting fragrance of lavenders, rosemary, thyme, pineapple broom (cytisus battandieri) and rugosa roses you will feel that this is the Mediterranean not the Pacific Ocean.
Surrounding a heritage cottage, under ancient apple trees is a garden that combines extensive collections of hellebores, cyclamens, snowdrops and euphorbias with other perennials, including wonderful foliage plants, and shrubs to create layered artistic borders of year round interest. Complimenting the ambiance of the home and garden are carefully selected containers and art. The enthusiastic gardening couple that have created this exquisite garden still find time to volunteer in the Abkhazi garden and with an international seed exchange program.
This hidden half-acre urban garden on a country lane is located in the Uplands neighbourhood of Oak Bay (a municipality adjoining Victoria). This is a half-acre organic garden which features wonderful deeply layered mixed boarders under the sinuous branching of the ancient (three to four hundred year old) Garry oaks. This gardener is a true artist utilizing a broad pallet of exotic and unusual plants, including many new plant introductions, which she has placed in her own imaginative combinations. Surrounded by exquisitely planted garden rooms are a Mediterranean patio and a naturalistic Koi pond. This is a welcoming manicured garden that is full of dramatic botanical surprises.
This garden maker designed and built unique garden rooms with her own trellises, fences, gates, arbours, and paving materials. She utilized recycled materials to create much of this garden which she designed repeating the classical landscape theme of the circle in a square throughout the garden. There are wonderful perennial boarders created by this knowledgeable plants woman who has written for one of western Canada's gardening magazines. There is the Edwardian style ‘rondel' covered with a magnificent collection of roses and clematis while tucked behind a twiggery screen supporting roses, clematis and red leaf grape is a meditative sanctuary garden.
This garden has been featured in several national magazines as well as by Ann Lovejoy in her two books “Cascadia” and “Naturalistic Gardening: Reflecting the Planting Patterns” of Nature. It is a fascinating garden that has borrowed from the gardening cultures of Japan, Korea and China. Ever evolving it has features that have been introduced for xeriscaping including – ponds, a drought tolerant Mediterranean area, a wild flower meadow (which also features grasses), and a bog garden. There is a woodland shade garden, oriental woodland garden and an enclosed sanctuary garden borrowing from the Japanese tea garden style.
Throughout this garden you will find integrated into the plantings pieces of original art and unique architecture that defines the character of this garden by adding both beauty and whimsy.
This wonderful garden will offer you wonderful mixed borders incorporating new plant introductions including some from New Zealand and Australia. A separate garden room is a rose garden featuring David Austin roses. Plantings inspired by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf surround a 1920's patio. A lush boulevard planting designed for year round interest surrounds this turn of the century Edwardian home tucked in on a street of other heritage homes. Throughout there is vibrant bloom and interplay of colour and foliage texture, which has been enhanced through a great use of grasses. Accenting these plantings are fences, trellises and arbours out of local red alder, pebble mosaics and water features all designed and made by the creative young woman who has created this beautiful garden which speaks to its history.