Jennie Butchart: Gardener of Dreams

Jennie Butchart's vision for a garden to blossom from an industrial limestone quarry comes to life in a serviceable nonfiction picture book penned by Haley Healey and illustrated by Kimiko Fraser. An orphan from a young age, high-spirited Jennie grows up with her aunt and seven cousins in Owen Sound. One page turn later, readers meet a full-grown Jennie who marries Robert Butchart; she and her young family move to Vancouver Island. Robert opens a cement plant where Jennie works as a chemist. After years of initial success, with their cement being delivered all over the world, the quarry near their home runs out of the limestone needed for the cement. A "big hole filled with rusty equipment and empty rock walls" is an eyesore near the family estate. What to do with such a scar in the landscape? Jennie decides to grow a garden from the ruins to make it beautiful once more.

Filled with enthusiasm, Jennie, who knows nothing about gardening, undertakes her project by enlisting the help of others and soaking in knowledge from books and experts about how to cultivate plants. She hires a landscape architect named Isaburo Kishida and brings in soil by horse and buggy to fill in the quarry. Readers see Jennie perched on a harness called a bosun's chair in order to plant ivy on the wall of the Sunken Garden and learn that she first begins by growing roses, sweet peas, and then moves on to cultivating violets, marigolds, pansies, and petunias.

The temperate climate of the island allows the garden to prosper, and Jennie brings back plants and flowers from around the world whenever she travels, such as the Himalayan blue poppy from Asia. In a double spread, readers see four small vignettes of gardens that Jennie adds to the space: the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden, the Italian Garden, and the Mediterranean Garden.
While Jennie introduces new plants, her husband Robert collects ducks, peacocks, and pigeons to live amongst the greenery while fountains and other beautiful structures add points of interest to the flowers and trees. Every year, more and more visitors flock to the garden, from locals to tourists, and even royalty. From years of plenty to years of trials, such as during World War II, the garden always remains open. In a beautiful spread of Jennie watering a rosebush, readers learn that Jennie picks bouquets for her friends and gifts fruit from the garden to local hospitals. The final spread shows people enjoying fireworks as readers learn that Jennie's grandson takes over the running of the gardens and adds entertainment from puppet shows to musical symphonies so that millions of people can enjoy Butchart Gardens, made a National Historic Site of Canada, for years to come.

Jennie Butchart: Gardener of Dreams, part of the “Trailblazing Canadians” series, is a solid biography of a Canadian who made an outsized impact on society through her creative and entrepreneurial endeavors. While I think the biography could have leaned into the nonfiction elements (such as the timeline of events at the back of the book) and used photographs of the lovely gardens rather than the somewhat static and subdued illustrations, the book’s contents, nevertheless, highlight the strength of character, love of beauty, and community-mindedness of a singular and unique individual.