Issue 5: July 29th, 2015

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the most beautiful floral gardens I’ve ever seen—Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island in Canada!

At the turn of the 19th Century, the Butchart family established a limestone quarry in Vancouver to supply the family’s cement factory. Years later, when the limestone had been depleted, Jennie, the matriarch of the family, decided to turn the desolate quarry into a garden. A garden? By this time the quarry was simply a gigantic hole in the ground with nothing growing anywhere in the large slabs of rock that formed the abandoned site. Why would anyone imagine that such a location could become a garden?

Well Jennie did. She had tons of soil brought in to line the barren rocks, and she even did some of the work herself, hanging from a metal basket contraption that allowed her to plant flowers high off the ground in the crevices of the quarry walls.  One hundred years later, this garden is rated among the most spectacular in the world.  Shocks of flowers in all the colors in the rainbow explode in each corner of the garden. In fact, the entire place is so mesmerizingly gorgeous that your eyes begin to get drunk on the stunning scenery. How amazing a transformation is that?  (see photos)

There are many of us whose lives at one time or another look just about as bad as that quarry did one hundred years ago—we’ve depleted our personal resources like money, energy, and health, and we don’t feel as if we have enough fertile ground left in our lives to make it into the fabulous thing we’d always hoped for.  But here is where the value of vision comes in—it’s really the only thing standing between us and the lives we want. As you gaze at the next full moon, begin to imagine the amazing life you want, and keep your focus there. Don’t get caught up in the desolation of your reality. What if Jennie had looked at that quarry and only seen a gigantic hole in the ground?

– Coach Andrea

See image on right in black and white of the garden at the start of its transformation. 

Photo Credit: The Butchart Gardens Website  http://www.butchartgardens.com/gardens/story

This is the sunken garden, which grew out of a big hole in the rocks!

Photo Credit: The Butchart Gardens Website http://www.butchartgardens.com/gardens/photos-and-video