Silent sentinels

Gates and Gate Posts: Marking Victoria’s Lost Garden Heritage
by Martin Segger

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Last October, commuters travelling along Craigflower might have noticed the sudden disappearance of a familiar landmark.  As word spread in the Vic West community, the response was one of stunned shock. Without warning, and certainly without any public discussion, one of the oldest landmarks in Vic West was gone. The historic gated entrance to Burleith had been replaced with a building site. The speed and attendant silence with which a building permit which followed the planning approval are symptoms of the Province’s bureaucratic streamlining under the new Missing Middle legislation.  The City admitted the gates and adjacent gatekeeper’s cottage had, for some reason, not been included in the Heritage Registry.

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Burleith

The slow creep of vegetation gradually enveloping the house gates, like ruins from a gothic novel, had intrigued both residents and casual commuters for decades.  But to devotees of Victoria’s built heritage, the significance of this crumbling ensemble was well known.  This and the imposing rock wall lining the northern edge of Craigflower Road for more than two blocks were the remnants of Burleith, the fabled James and Laura Dunsmuir garden estate. It was originally built in 1892 on a gentle slope overlooking Gorge Inlet.

James and Laura Dunsmuir, heirs to a vast coal mining empire, expended $50,000 to build a large Victorian mansion, Burleith, named after his father’s ancestral village in Scotland.  Wrought-iron gates and a gatehouse provided a fitting ceremonial entrance to the extensive gardens designed by John Blair, creator of Beacon Hill Park.  These Art Nouveau-style gates were added in 1905, likely as part of renovation designs supplied by the society architect Samuel Maclure.

A curving driveway deposited visitors at the main door. Beds for flowering shrubs and perennials flanked the driveway and bordered the terraced lawns that stepped down to the waterfront, where James kept his private yacht. A thick coniferous forest was preserved to provide a backdrop for the house and a riding woodland for family recreation. Croquet and badminton lawns, tennis courts, and a playhouse for the children completed the scheme.

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Craigdarroch Castle  

These massive stone archways, now flanking the access to Joan Crescent on the south side of Upper Fort Street, are reconstructions of the originals.  They were built by the Craigdarroch Castle Society in 1910. The specially commissioned wrought gates were installed in 2011. Joan Crescent now winds through a 1920s subdivision carved out of the original 20-acre Craigdarroch Castle estate.

Built for James and Joan Dunsmuir between 1887 and 1890, Victoria’s wealthiest family at the time, the statuesque Scottish Baronial pile stood atop the Fort Street rise. The location and landscaped gardens were intended to impress. The visitor skirted the stone wall along upper Fort Street to enter through a magnificent set of wrought-iron gates. Flanking arched pillars framed the first view of the house. The approach curved up a steep slope, flanked by rock gardens and flowerbeds, as the towering bulk of the house came into view.

In its day, this was the most impressive of Victoria’s professionally designed estate gardens. Robert Dunsmuir died before the Castle was completed, but from here, his widow, Joan, ran the vast coal-mining empire her husband had built until her death in 1908. The estate was then subdivided and sold. Each buyer was given a lottery ticket, the prize: Craigdarroch Castle itself. In subsequent years, the Castle served as a military convalescent hospital and as facilities for the Victoria Conservatory of Music until the non-profit Craigdarroch Castle Society took it over and opened it as a historical museum.

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Robleda

Barely discernible above the enveloping laurel hedge are the entrance gate pillars of Robleda.  It was once one of the most impressive estates in Rockland. Thomas B. Hall and his Haitian-born wife, Eva, commissioned the house and gardens in 1890 from the architect William Ridgeway Wilson.  Between 1903 and 1904, Captain James William Troup, an American, and his wife, Frances, lived in it; it was then occupied by financier John Arbuthnot and his wife, Agnes, from 1908 to 1927, when it was destroyed by fire.

From the entrance on Rockland, Robleda was captured in views across a garden landscape. The approach is constrained by laurel hedges lining the long driveway approach, which lead to the more formal, restrained landscaping adjacent to the house.  The Garry Oaks provide minimal visual relief. Spare use of ornamental trees, shrubs, and flower beds reinforced the presence of the house, even as, over the years, this effect has been somewhat softened by the ivy climbers on the tower walls. The house burned down in 1927 and was replaced by a rambling Arts and Crafts-style mansion, which in 1951 became today’s Robleda Apartments.

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Gisburn

Two sets of massive, pillared entrances formalize the breaks in an equally impressive, rusticated stone wall skirting part of the west side of Moss Street and extending westward on Rockland.  They marked the access to Gisburn, home to three of Victoria’s most noted establishment families. 

It was built in 1890 and designed by John Teage for Robert and Mary Irving.  Robert represented numerous railway, streetcar and steamship interests in Victoria. Following his death in 1901, Robin Dunsmuir and his wife, Maud, leased the house briefly while their Maclure-designed mansion was under construction on Esquimalt Road. In 1912, it passed into the hands of early Victoria industrialist, R.P Rithet. The Rithets occupied it until 1936. 

Gisburn’s 5-acre gardens were enclosed by a massive stone wall with wrought iron fencing, which is all that remains of the estate today. To reinforce the monumental effect of the house, capped with its central clock tower, the surrounding grounds were gradually cleared, scraped, and shaped.  From the corner entrance gates, one approached the house along the generous curve of a driveway that continued to a carriage house and stables at the rear, then exited to Rockland through another set of impressive gates. Cuts in the well-preserved wall and fence now provide access to the subdivision houses, which were built on the property after its demolition in the late 1930s.

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Queenswood Estate

Two heavy masonry columns on Arbutus Avenue near the University of Victoria flank the entrance to a driveway that curves off into wild woodland. The pillars are capped by ornate light fixtures long since disconnected. The gardens of Queenswood on Arbutus Road provided the setting for a large Arts-and-Crafts style manor house designed by James and Savage, architects. It was built in 1929, Lieut. Col. Alan Abbott Sharland acquired the 200 acres of Garry Oak and Arbutus woodland near Ten-mile Point.

The Queenswood estate would eventually include, along with the house, a chauffeur’s quarters, squash and tennis courts, a greenhouse, a summer house, pergolas, a rockery and a rose garden.  A gamekeeper’s cottage for Sharland’s “game farm,” was contained in the acreage for breeding pheasants.  The house was seriously damaged by fire in 1959 and demolished in 1962. Elements of the gardens were retained during the Sisters of St. Ann’s tenure, when the house site was redeveloped for their “Queenswood House of Studies.” 

The Sisters’ architect, John Di Castri, incorporated the original rockery and trellised rose garden into his new design for the House of Studies that would continue the Queenswood name. Recently acquired and demolished by new owners, the University of Victoria, only the rusting entry gates on Arbutus Road and remnants of the rose garden featured in a 1920s national garden magazine survive, albeit in ruins.

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Clovelly

The brick gate pillars at the entrance to Clovelly now welcome the public to Barnard Park, accessed from Esquimalt Road at the end of Barnard Avenue in Vic West.  A historic marker plaque references the garden’s original creators, Sir Frank and Ellen Stillman Barnard.

The brick gate pillars at the entrance to Clovelly now welcome the public to Barnard Park, accessed from Esquimalt Road at the end of Barnard Avenue in Vic West.  A historic marker plaque references the garden’s original creators, Sir Frank and Ellen Stillman Barnard.

Frank Barnard, one of Victoria most influential businessmen, served as a city alderman, then a conservative MP and from 1914 to 1919 Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia.

The house and gardens provided a setting for the Barnards’ ever-improving lifestyle, which accompanies the rise in their fortunes.  They bought the Esquimalt seaside estate in 1900. It bordered on a small cove provided berthing for Barnard’s yacht, Quenca.  Samuel Maclure designed substantial additions for the house garden improvements in 1912. A summary description of the garden was provided in advertising for the sale of property in 1943, following the death of Lady Barnard.

… secluded grounds and gardens comprising 2 ½ acres of natural woodland, lawns, rockeries, and rose gardens. Many imported shrubs and plants are considered one of the finest in Canada.  A log summer house with an open fireplace is picturesquely set at the top of one of the lawns. 

Oddly, there is no mention of the Barnards’ Japanese garden designed by Isaburo Kishida about 1910 during his stay in Victoria to design the Takata Japanese Tea Gardens on the Gorge Waterway.

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Lindhurst

Two orphaned random stone gate posts now stand on the verge of Old Esquimalt Road near the Lampson School playground. They once welcomed you to a winding driveway flanked by beds of domestic and native wild-flowers that wound its way up the hill to Lindhurst built in 1913 for Harry and Laura Pooley.

Harry Pooley was the son of Charles E. Pooley, and Lindhurst was carved out of his father’s 27-acre estate, which stretched back from the north-east corner of Esquimalt Road and Lampson Street.  Harry had a long career as a lawyer and politician, representing Esquimalt in the Provincial House for 23 years. He inherited his green thumb from his father and was an enthusiastic gardener. The Pooley gardens were noted for their wide variety of plant materials, especially his collection of rock and alpine plants.

In 1941, Canadian Homes and Gardens Magazine enthused over the mature garden.

Picture an easy slope online to cares of the noontide sun yet swept with the cool shadows of spreading oaks and gemmed here and there with moss-draped boulders encrusted with Ferns and with Sedums of crimson and jade. And now imagine reclining at ease while the leaves and wildflowers sway and curtsey to drowsy stirrings of the sweet air, reaching the certain decision that here is the spot for one’s dream home.

The house survives today but is crammed into a modern housing subdivision.

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Government House

The ornate and impressive ceremonial gates that guard the entrances to Government House on Rockland Avenue now frame a very different view from when they were completed in 1912. The 1899 fire, which destroyed the old Cary Castle, created an opportunity to reconceptualize both the house and the gardens.

The resulting Queen Anne-style manor house, perched on the edge of the Rockland Bench above Fairfield, was designed by society architects F. M. Rattenbury and Samuel Maclure. A disastrous fire destroyed it in1957.  The government immediately charged the Department of Public Works with designing and constructing a replacement in a “traditional” modern style.  The new building occupies the footprint of the previous house.

The elaborate wrought-iron gates and fence bordering Rockland Avenue were part of the garden replanning by landscape architect G. K. Maclean.  Tendered in 1910, the gates were completed in 1912 at a cost of $36,000. The stonework contract was awarded to John Mortimer and Sons of Victoria. The gates were crafted by Hartley Ornamental Iron and Wire Works of Vancouver.  But the ornamental detailing, including the provincial coat-of-arms, was the work of the famous Tiffany Studios of New York.

The main elements of the Maclean landscape plan have largely been preserved in the contemporary gardens lovingly maintained by the Government House Gardens Society, a volunteer group.

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Mount Joy

Two massive field-stone pillars at 613/615 Foul Bay Road marked the entrance to Mount Joy, home of Fred and Martha Pemberton. Frederick Barnard Pemberton was the oldest son of Colonial Survey General F.B. Pemberton. Acreage for the house and gardens was carved out of the Pemberton Woods, part of the family’s 1,200-acre landholdings extending from Rockland and eastern Fairfield, through to Oak Bay. 

Pemberton was a noted horticulturist who pioneered large-scale holly farming on Vancouver Island. The family’s extensive gardens at Mount Joy exhibited a tightly controlled balance between the natural woodland site and its native ground cover. In the rear, a densely developed late Victorian ornamental landscape design mixed both native plants and imported exotics.

Mount Joy is nestled into a break in the steep hillsides of the Gonzales and Foul Bay rise.  The natural field-stone gate posts of dry-stone walls fronting Foul Bay Road introduce the ‘naturalistic’ Arts-and-Crafts aesthetic. Mount Joy was demolished in 1952. Subdivisions have gradually filled the once extensive and magnificent gardens.

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Arran

This hip-roofed lychgate at the corner of Oak Bay Avenue and York Place now looks sadly orphaned as it merely frames the view to a modern apartment building.

Originally it marked the entrance to Arran, built for Mrs. Lulie Jones Gore in 1906/7 to designs by Samuel Maclure.  County court Judge, J. Charles McIntosh extended the garden to the corner of York Place and Oak Bay Avenue. They built the lychgate, a feature borrowed from English country churchyards.  “Lytch” derives from the Anglo-Saxon word for corpse. Here, the gate provided a welcome entrance to a lavish ornamental garden. Extensive lawns reached back to the house perched on the hill behind. Pathways wound through ornamental beds, fishponds, and a swimming pool.

The chalet-style house survives, commanding a view over York Place, but the extensive gardens have been replaced by an apartment block and housing infill.

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The Bowker Estate gates

The monumental entrance to the garden estate of John Sylvester and Mary Bowker was de-constructed and recreated to provide a pedestrian entrance to Willows Park from Cadboro Bay Road.  The acreage for the house was given to the couple by Mary’s father, John Tod, from part of his extensive Oak Bay Uplands farm.  In 1912, Samuel Maclure provided designs for relandscaping the gardens and building a formal entrance to the estate.

The gates originally opened onto an alley of trees flanking the driveway to the house’s main entrance.   Like most society gardens of the day, the scheme included a croquet lawn with a guest pavilion, a tennis court, decorative rockery leading into a rose garden parterre, and a screened tea garden adjacent to the house. The gates and walls assembly was actually reconstructed on the Beach Drive edge of Willows Park after a 1932 subdivision of the estate.

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Foreen

A lone relocated gate post once marked the entrance to “Foreen”. The name derives from region of Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland. Originally, the post was one of two pillars which stood at the head of the driveway to one of Samuel Maclure’s most impressive Arts-and-Crafts houses. It towered over a series of rock retaining walls on the edge of Foul Bay escarpment. 

The house, built in 1912, on the northwest corner of Foul Bay and McNeil, was commissioned by lawyer and sometime mayor, Thornton Fell Q.C. and his wife, Elizabeth. Vistas from its balconies and terraces commanded views across three points of the compass. Maclure obviously took great pride in his design, as it was featured in both national and international architectural periodicals. The large, extensive rock garden is now largely built over. 

The entrance pillar has been relocated to make way for a modern infill house, although Foreen itself survives, perched precariously above on the edge of the Foul Bay Road escarpment.

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Eastdon

Three classical-style brick gate pillars front a modern condo at the corner of Burdett and Vancouver streets. A standard formula for large estate gardens, they framed a pedestrian and carriage entrance. The wall and gates still feature their original ironwork, memorializing Eastdon and its extensive garden setting.

Eastdon was the home of engineer-surveyor Dennis Harris and his wife Martha. Martha was the favourite and youngest daughter of Sir James Douglas the first Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island. The estate was named after the Harris family home in Devon, England. The gardens provided a setting for the house on Church Hill and encompassed nearly an entire block, sloping down to the North side of Beacon Hill Park. The Harrises moved out in 1899.

The large shingle-style house stood from 1890 to 1919, when it was destroyed by fire. The house served briefly as home to the Collegiate School for Boys, then as Burdette House, a boarding hostel and a quarantine hospital during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In 1942, the Deco-style Mount St. Mary’s hospital was built within the original estate walls. In 2003, a condo block replaced it, although the gates and surrounding brick walls were designated heritage and preserved.

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Hatley Park

The elaborate wrought iron gates and gatehouse originally guarded the entrance to Hatley Park, the vast 230-hectare estate of Robert and Laura Dunsmuir. Today, the gates are permanently shut, and weeds encroach on the abandoned driveway, which has now been diverted through a military housing subdivision.

The large country house, with its acres of gardens, model farm, and surrounding woodland, was a trophy marking the zenith of Robert’s business and political career.  It followed the sale of Vancouver Island coal mining interests and term as Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. 

The gatehouse and cut-stone wall lining Sooke Road were part of the 1913 landscape and garden plan commissioned from the prestigious Boston firm of landscape architects, Brett and Hall.  It was intended to complement the monumental Maclure-designed castle-house modelled on a Tudor English country-house, which has been preserved at the centre of Royal Roads University campus.

To get a feel of the original entry drive through the woodlands surrounding the castle, you should enter today through the little-known, and somewhat neglected, east gate. College Road approaches it on the south-east edge of the estate.  The towering gateposts, still supporting their (long-unused) wrought-iron hardware, are emblazoned with the words “Hatley” and “Park”.  They lead into a picturesque drive through wooded glades that finally opens into a grand open vista, terminated at the north end by the massive bulk of the Dunsmuir’s castle-in-the-country.

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Uplands Estates

Three sets of pillared entrances formally announce that you are entering the prestigious garden estates of Uplands. Originally a Hudson Bay Company farm, the 465 acres now comprising Uplands Estates were purchased in 1907 by a consortium headed by W. W. Gardner. One of the best-known firms of American landscape architects, Olmsted Bros., working from their Seattle office, planned the subdivision, now a National Historic Site.

The main formal south entrance to Uplands on Beach Drive does not lead directly into the endless manicured garden landscape intended by Olmstead, but instead quickly gives way to 50 acres of wild Garry oak parkland. This resulted from a land exchange with Oak Bay to pay outstanding taxes in 1946.

But the gates have an interesting history. The pillared entrances were all designed by Pierre-Jules Boulanger, a Seattle-based French architect who worked briefly in the Victoria office of Rochfort and Sankey in 1913. Boulanger returned to France, where he had an illustrious career as an industrial designer, ultimately serving as project chief for the design and production of the 2CV at Citroen.

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Conclusion

Victoria’s urban landscape is littered with these remnants or references, in this case, to the golden age of Victoria’s great garden estates.  They are a part of a legacy of similar markers, such as iron curbs that once protected sidewalks from steel-rimmed carriage wheels, hitching posts for horses stabled in the Rockland and Fernwood neighbourhoods, or small pockets of Garry Oaks that survived from a pre-settlement habitat that nurtured the Lekwungen people. These touchstones of community memory lend richness and meaning to the built heritage that tells Victoria’s story. They are part of what makes Victoria more than just an agglomeration of buildings or potential development sites. We watch their erosion at the risk of imperilling that unique sense of shared place.

Missing Middle Solutions Inc, developers of the Burleith gates and gatehouse site, have since indicated the historic gates will be featured in some form as part of  the site at 701 Craigflower Road.

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Martin Segger is an architectural historian and author.  This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Tending Eden: A garden history of Victoria. [Editor’s note: Martin Segger has recently reviewed books by Robert Ratcliffe Taylor, Michael Prokopow, Raymond Biesinger & Alex Bozikovic, Allen Specht, Liz Bryan, and Michael Kluckner. He reviewed two previous exhibitions at the Wentworth Villa Architectural Heritage Museum: From the Ground, into the Light: Organic Architecture of the Islands, 1950-2000 and John Di Castri, Architect, A Retrospective (1924-2005) for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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