Butchart Gardens -- a colorful concrete connection

Come on, Spring, let's get a move on! It snowed today in Madison -- more white when I'm looking for a little green on the ground and in the trees. So I spent some time looking at the website for Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island in Canada for a little Spring fix. But I wouldn't blog about the pictures of the colorful flowers in bloom all year round if it didn't have a concrete connection. The gardens are housed on the grounds that once belonged to Robert Butchart, who manufactured portland cement near his home in the early 1990s. His wife, Jennie, started the gardens in an exhausted limestone quarry. A little ingenuity in turning an empty pit in the earth into a beautiful floral garden -- I'm feeling a little better!