Returning to the Butchart Gardens

Fifty years ago, rushing ahead of my parents 

and friend Sharon, I ran down these same paths 

edged with lobelias and blue poppies

on Vancouver Island. Sea hollies bobbed 

like small purple pinecones on stalks, canna lilies 

waved pink silks, begonias danced in several shades 

of red. The Sunken Garden, once a limestone quarry, 

overflowed with dahlias and hydrangeas. I’d never

been in an airplane; no one had a cell phone 

or computer; no one had walked on the moon.

What have I done these fifty years? Fell in love 

with a field of wild irises and a boy I met

at Al’s Drive-In when I was fourteen, wore 

a tight, blue-satin Chinese dress to our wedding 

seven months later, bore a daughter while pink

and lavender mariposa tulips opened, left 

my husband, stapled lids to chicken dinner plates

for a living, missing the blue-runner violet’s

spectacular display, married the same man

again at seventeen, while slender sunflowers

nodded their yellow heads in an autumn breeze,

left him again in spring, when fire poppies ignited

the coastal range, learned to solve differential 

equations and identify the parts of a flower

(pistil, stigma, style, ovary, anther, filament),

fell in love with a man who said at a party,

“You look like you want to dance,” married 

him in a meadow by a redwood grove

where chickweed looked like drifts of snow, 

bore another daughter, measured the electrical 

potential across the membrane of an egg cell 

of a mud whelk, wrote technical manuals, 

left my husband, taught students to distinguish

between monocots and dicots by the veins

in their leaves, interviewed scientists, wrote about 

how the universe bloomed from a single seed, 

ran a health museum, wrote poems filled 

with wildflowers, fell in love again, married 

him under a canopy whose poles were twined 

with pink, red, white and yellow roses, held 

bronze urns containing my parents’ ashes

on a hillside above the bay, played Candy Land

with my grandchildren while seasons changed

and the rhododendrons in my front yard grew

heavy again with bell-shaped flowers.

Of course, Mrs. Butchart’s gardens look different

now, smaller, the roses no longer in bloom. 

Arched trellises, once laden with red blossoms 

hanging over the path, are wound with empty vines. 

I reach the end, the Italian Garden—so genteel 

with its walkways and cross-shaped central bed 

of marigolds and peonies—just before the gift shop. 

But I want to go back, so I run to the head 

of the path and make a mad dash, sprinting now

back toward the Sunken Garden for one more look

before the delphiniums and begonias fade.

Lucille Lang Day is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and Becoming an Ancestor. Read more.


“Returning to the Butchart Gardens” was first published in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2012), edited by Andrena Zawinski.

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