In 1904, Jennie decided to beautify a worked-out limestone quarry from which her husband had earned his living. With one seed beneath the topsoil that had been shipped in and used to fill the quarry floor, Jennie began to create a masterpiece.

Jennie Butchart used rare and exotic shrubs, trees and flowers to indulge a hobby that eventually expanded to include 55 acres of lavish gardens, including a sunken garden, a rose garden, a Japanese garden, a star pond featuring a frog fountain, an Italian garden, a piazza and a Mediterranean garden.

Jennie’s garden is now named The Butchart Gardens, which are located outside Victoria, British Columbia. By the 1920s, over 50,000 visitors came each year to see the results of her labors. Today, well over one million visitors tour the gardens each year. One hundred years after its humble beginning, The Butchart Gardens was named a National Historic Site of Canada.

Throughout the acres of lush foliage, visitors pass in and out of the sun, shaded by bending trees and refreshed by water gardens. Taking a few minutes to cool off provides a moment or two to reflect on Jennie’s hobby and what it can teach us about our living.

Like Jennie, each of us plants seeds, albeit a different variety, with our life’s purpose. Like Jennie, we have the opportunity to choose the seeds we plant and the responsibility to plant them in fertile soil, rich for growth and blossoms.

Seeds like joy, kindness, humility and patience, if planted in the right circumstances, can begin to cultivate a garden in our hearts that, like the flowers in Jennie’s gardens, brings delight to those who benefit from it. Like Jennie’s garden, though, our heart’s garden requires careful tending, weeding and pruning to produce the most desired blossoms.

The Butchart Gardens employs 50 full-time and 12 part-time gardeners. They tend to every weed, pulling them before they strangle the flowers that yearn to bloom. They pull dead branches and prune the plants at appropriate times to provide optimum opportunities for the magnificent flowers to show their stuff.

Perhaps if we could employ 50 full-time gardeners in our hearts, we might not struggle so much to get things right. Joy, kindness, humility and patience don’t always grow naturally in my heart’s soil. More often than I want to admit, they experience a contentious journey with misery, a mean spirit, pride and frustration, battling within to see which one will arise victorious.

It’s a constant task to keep the battle in check, to give those positive seeds every opportunity they need to grow. For when they grow, the effects of my heart’s garden can be as generous as Jennie Butchart’s gardens; they can be welcoming and warming, offering delight and joy, rest and respite to those that I encounter.

As a gesture to all the visitors who began frequenting The Butchart Gardens, the family named their estate “Benvenuto,” the Italian word for welcome. What an interesting experiment it would be if each of us christened our own lives “welcome,” and invited friends and strangers alike into our worlds with open arms. Instead of hiding behind created images and protective facades, we instead would openly share ourselves with one another.

We’d savor the blooms and work to get rid of those nasty weeds, because we would learn that the hard work of pruning and weeding produces a much more beautiful product. Instead of creating more and deeper distances among ourselves, we’d learn to collaborate to produce gardens full of myriad blossoms, each of which contributes to the overall magnificence.

Jennie Butchart took one seed and became its steward. Her stewardship has brought delight to millions. What seed will we plant in our heart’s garden? What kind of steward will we be? And what kind of delight might we bring to those around us who may need just the kind of bloom our seed has produced?

One seed can create a masterpiece. Let’s get gardening.

T&D columnist Harris C. Murray can be reached by e-mail at writeharris55@yahoo.com.

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