The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan

suicide-gray skies. Instead, they found the Blue Hole, a term used by pilots cruising above the predominant cloud cover. The Olympic Mountains snag the Pacific clouds and wring them till they’re dry, creating a rain-scarce zone over the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula, the San Juan Islands and the lower part of Vancouver Island. So, while it pours 150 inches or more on the Pacific shore, fifty miles away the American town of Sequim gets less rain than Los Angeles. Victoria is at the north end of the Blue Hole. As I look out now at the Olympics, the tips are covered in dense clouds while sunlight saturates Victoria. This is Canada’s Palm Springs; people from all over the Great White North come here to “winter” in a town that is actually farther north than any of the major cities of Eastern Canada.
    In the last grip of sunlight, the world is as it would be if every square inch of land had a benevolent keeper. Azaleas, dwarf junipers and the yellow blooms of the marsh marigold crowd the view to the south. The view the other way brings flowering Japanese crabapples near beds of anemone and polyanthus. The land rolls and buckles, rippling color lines in the fading light. Then, the sun drops behind the glass of Brentwood Bay, fifteen miles north of the center of Victoria. A full moon is on the edge of the tree line, sending light back into the lake below, an abandoned quarry pit. From the center of the deep lake, water shoots up, a lavender-colored spray followed by a pair of green bursts and now a rainbow finale. The effect is of a giant blossom, a hydro-flower, unfolding then retreating in the kind of fast-forward used in the old Disney nature films. Other lights come on, spotlighting rockeries in full flower, archways of purple roses. All around, a full 130 acres has been crafted into controlled beauty, offset only by the odd sight of an old kiln stack poking above the trees. It is not the muscled supergrowth of the rain forest, nor the wildflower-meadows of the high country. It is the stamp of the Empire in the land of evergreen.
    When the railroads were emptying thousands of newcomers into the cities of the Northwest and the forests and mines were being scraped ina frenzy, Robert Pim Butchart ran a turn-of-the-century limestone quarry here, from which he extracted material for cement. It made him a very wealthy man. When the quarry was all used up, Mrs. Robert Pim Butchart was repelled by the brutalized landscape left behind; it was ugly and offensive. She set out to remake it, planting poplars and rhododendrons, wallflowers and creeping ivy—anything that would grow and produce lasting beauty in the temperate climate of southern Vancouver Island. Thus began Butchart Gardens, a shrine as pulse-quickening to gardeners as Graceland is to Elvis Presley fans.
    The Blue Poppy of Tibet, first planted in North America here from seeds given Mrs. Butchart by the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, leaves an Impressionistic blur against the fountain of bronze dolphins cast in Florence. The poppies are a British colonial legacy, brought back to England by an army captain. I have never seen anything like them. Here, they coexist with a Japanese garden that is a hundred yards from the seashore, and an Italian garden surrounded by fifty-foot-high cypress trees. The mind rushes to overstatement. But this much seems obvious: not even the Tuileries of Paris can compare. Strolling on the grounds, I hear Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, French, Dutch, Japanese. They make the common sound of awe. In transforming this quarry pit to paradise, Mrs. Butchart has proven that the land of the Northwest does not have to be scraped bare to turn a profit.
    The lesson seems lost on the rest of Vancouver Island. From the fjords of the east side to the ocean shore of the west, hill after hill has been completely stripped. On this week in midspring, the largest western red cedar in the world has just been discovered in the thin coastal sanctuary of Pacific