By Rick Los, Director of Horticulture

There is a bit of a gap between seasonal e-newsletters so I thought I would back up a couple of steps before moving right into summer. We left off last time talking about the colourful and exciting bulb display and we were fortunate to experience one of our best spring bulb displays ever. We have completed the planning (and changes) for next year and we look forward to an even better display next spring.

As nature pushes us into summer, spring fades away and we face one of the biggest challenges of the year. This challenge involves digging up every single bulb and biennial from the garden, amending the soil and planting the tens of thousands of annuals for the summer display.

We are often asked about what happens to the nearly 300,000 bulbs dug up from the garden each year. Well, unfortunately we have to answer that most of the bulbs will not be used again in the garden as we do not allow them to mature properly before harvesting them, as a commercial grower would do. What is good for our visitors is not always beneficial to the plants as we avoid allowing our visitors to see what most would consider unsightly plants in their natural state of decline. However, there are other winners here as we also keep the bulb growers in Holland happy by renewing our order every year.   

As I mentioned, we do amend the soil before planting and we try to target the needs of the individual borders as much as possible. We do fairly extensive soil testing to get a handle on the nutrient levels, pH (acidity/alkalinity) and organic content of the borders, and add custom blends of compost and fertilizer as required. The individual plantings also have specific needs so we try to match this up as much as possible. In our soil management program one of our goals is to become completely organic and we are making good progress in achieving this.

Soil might not be the most exciting gardening topic, but together with water, and water quality, it is probably the most critical element for the success of any gardening endeavor.

Hopefully you will be able to come and enjoy our beautiful summer display this year. If you do, be sure to thank the gardeners for the hard work they do in maintaining and beautifying our garden. Much of their work is visually very obvious, but there is also a lot of seemingly invisible work that goes into managing the soils which enable us to grow healthy, vigorous and perhaps most importantly, colourful plants (because of course, we are The Butchart Gardens!)