Hatley Park – In the City of Gardens
Victoria British Columbia is the City of Gardens and Hatley Park, 25 minutes from the downtown area, is one of the most exquisite places in all of Canada.
Visit our showcase gardens and experience their breath-taking beauty.
Garden workshops and tours of these special places are available at different times throughout the year.
A Brief History on Our Gardens
In 1912, the Dunsmuirs engaged the American landscape architects Franklin Brett and George D. Hall of Boston, students of Frederick Law Olmstead, to develop a landscape for the entire site. They prepared a classic design for an Edwardian park that included the overall layout for the entire property. The plan carefully organized the estate into four distinct landscape zones progressing from a series of nine formal ‘garden rooms’ near Hatley Castle, to recreational spaces, then to agricultural lands, and finally to the forest surrounding the estate.
During the Dunsmuir era, approximately 100 gardeners and groundskeepers tended the estate. During the years when the cadets attended Royal Roads Military College, the Department of National Defence employed approximately 50 gardeners and groundskeepers to maintain the property; a testimony to their commitment to retaining the integrity of Hatley Estate.
Today, Royal Roads University, with a mandate to achieve self-sufficiency as a public educational institution, employs five full time gardeners, one arborist, a garden curator, seven seasonal gardeners and groundskeepers, and one manager to tend to the entire 565-acre estate, including the formal gardens.
These passionate gardeners take tremendous pride in their work, ensuring the gardens and trails may be enjoyed by the public year-round.
As the university does not receive any federal, provincial or municipal funding to maintain the largest historic site in Canada, the gardeners must make choices about the areas that can be best presented. To this end, the Japanese, Rose and Italian gardens are our showcase areas of the property.
The Lord & Burnham 1914 Greenhouse Restoration
The 1914 Lord and Burnham Greenhouse, formerly the working greenhouse for the fruit crops, provides the historical link to the gardening traditions of both the Dunmsuir and Royal Roads Military College eras.
Thanks to the generosity of the Fisher Foundation, a $750,000 gift to restore the greenhouse enabled the university to preserve the most threatened heritage structure on the site. As the only remaining greenhouse of this type in Canada, the greenhouse restoration will enable Royal Roads University to recreate the plant propagation activities within, provide educational tours of the facility, as well as make this available to horticulture education.
The project began in September 2005 and was completed in the winter of 2007.
The university received an additional gift of $40,000 from the Fisher Foundation to ensure the maintenance of the greenhouse for the next 100 years.
Charitable Registration Number 881174528RR0001