Victory Gardens 2012

Welcome to the gardens at The Victory. We opened our building to the public in June 2007 and spent the following winter planning improvements to what was only blacktop and brick. We retained nearly all of the laid bricks in the forecourt, built a sidewalk along the access from Main Street to Benson Park, and created more than a thousand square feet (100 square meteres) of flower beds. We then planted roses, hydrangeas, hibiscus, ground cover and more.

The plants seemed to enjoy themselves, and by 2012, the spring flowers – tulips, violets and iris were the first colour.

In the late fall of 2011, we were obliged to remove the trees from the forecourt. Austrian pines have a relativly short life expectancy and ours were over thirty years old (we counted the rings!) and rot had started to set in. The result can be seen in this photograph, taken from the windows of our new reading room on the second floor.

We are proud to host the heritage sign commemorating Sir John A. MacDonald's early career in Picton, seen here surrounded by summer blooms in the planetrs and Marc Bourdon's granite sculpture.

While some of the bigger shrubs attract the visitor's eye, our border flowers are an intrinsic esthetical part of the design.

At the rear of our property, overlooking Benson Park, the fence on the floodwall gave us a marvelous opportunity to encourage rambling roses – there are days when there is more red than green visible to our visitors.