Crystal Garden and Butchart Gardens Travel Guide

The heavily advertised Crystal Gardens , behind the bus terminal at 713 Douglas St (daily: July & Aug 8.30am-8pm; May-June & Sept-Oct 9am-6pm; Nov-April 10am-4.30pm; $7.50; tel 381-1213, www.bcpcc.com/crystal ), was designed on the model of London's destroyed Crystal Palace and was billed on opening in 1925 as housing the "Largest Saltwater Swimming Pool in the British Empire". Now much restored, the greenery-, monkey- and bird-filled greenhouse makes for an unaccountably popular tourist spot; only the exterior has any claims to architectural sophistication, and much of its effect is spoilt by the souvenir shops on its ground-floor arcade. Once the meeting place of the town's tea-sipping elite, it still plays host to events such as the Jive and Ballroom Dance Club and the People Meeting People Dance. The daytime draws are the conservatory-type tearoom and tropical gardens. Inhumanely enclosed birds and monkeys, though, are liable to put you off your scones.

If you're into things horticultural you'll want to make a trek out to the heavily over-advertised but celebrated Butchart Gardens , 22km north of Victoria at 800 Benvenuto, Brentwood Bay on Hwy 17 towards the Swartz Bay ferry terminal (daily: mid-June to Aug 9am-10.30pm; first half of June & Sept 9am-9pm; rest of the year 9am-sunset; $16.50; tel 652-4422 or 652-5256 for recorded information, www.butchartgardens.com ). They're also renowned amongst visitors and locals alike for the stunning firework displays that usually take place each Saturday evening in July and August. The gardens are also illuminated during the late-evening opening hours between mid-June and the end of September. To get here by public transport take bus #75 for "Central Sahnich" from downtown. Otherwise there are regular summer Shuttles (May-Oct daily hourly in the morning, half-hourly in the afternoon tel 388-5248) from the main bus terminal, where tickets ($24.50) are obtainable not from the main ticket office but from a separate Gray Lines desk: ticket prices include garden entrance and return bus journey. The gardens were started in 1904 by Mrs.Butchart wife of a mineowner and pioneer of Portland Cement in Canada and the US. The initial aim was to landscape one of her husband's quarries - the gardens now cover fifty breathtaking acres, comprising rose, Japanese and Italian gardens and lots of decorative details. About half a million visitors a year tramp through the foliage, which includes over a million plants and seven hundred different species.