Walking from Brentwood Bay to Butchart Gardens
Most people drive to Butchart Gardens, park in the lot, and walk straight through the gates. There’s a better way to arrive.
Starting from the village of Brentwood Bay, you can walk to the gardens through forest and along the shore of Tod Inlet, covering about 5 kilometres on a route that’s more interesting than anything you’ll find on the garden paths themselves. The walk takes roughly ninety minutes at an easy pace, and you end up approaching Butchart from the back side rather than the parking lot.
The route
Begin at the Brentwood Bay village centre, where Verdier Avenue meets the waterfront. The marina sits here, along with a few shops and the pub. Head north along the waterfront road and then pick up the trail that leads into the forest behind the Brentwood Bay ferry terminal.
The first section follows a residential road before entering forest on the Tod Creek trail. This path drops through second-growth Douglas fir and bigleaf maple, crossing a small creek before reaching the head of Tod Inlet. The forest here is dense and damp, even in summer, and the light filters through the canopy in shafts.
At Tod Inlet, the trail meets the shoreline. This is the old quarry site where limestone was extracted for the Butchart cement operation starting in 1904. The remains of the works are mostly gone, but you can still see concrete footings and the odd piece of rusted machinery if you look carefully in the undergrowth.
Follow the shoreline trail north. The inlet is narrow and sheltered, and the water is often perfectly still. Kingfishers work the shallows. In fall, the bigleaf maples along the shore turn yellow and drop leaves onto the water surface.
The trail eventually climbs away from the inlet and connects to the service roads behind Butchart Gardens. You’ll enter the gardens through the back entrance rather than the main gate.
Logistics
You need a ticket to enter Butchart Gardens, and showing up on foot doesn’t change that. Buy tickets online in advance, especially in summer.
For the return trip, you have options. Walk back the way you came. Take the bus (Route 75 has a stop on Benvenuto Avenue near the gardens). Or arrange a pickup.
The walk is doable year-round, though the Tod Inlet trail gets muddy from November through February. Sturdy shoes are worth wearing.
Why bother
The route gives you context that driving doesn’t. You see the landscape that Jennie Butchart was looking at when she decided to turn a worked-out quarry into a garden. You walk past the inlet where barges loaded limestone for the cement works. The gardens make more sense when you understand what was there before.
The walk through Tod Inlet is also just a genuinely good stretch of coastal forest trail. Quiet, shaded, with the inlet visible through the trees. It’s one of the better short walks on the peninsula, and most visitors to the area never find it because they’re driving past it on the way to the parking lot.