One of the highlights of our recent trip to the Pacific Northwest was the day we spent at Butchart Gardens near the small city of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Reading about this attraction did not prepare me for its beauty and intensity and I took hundreds of pictures, but I still had time to watch people viewing the plants and flowers. I was too inhibited (or polite?) to approach any of these intriguing people to have a conversation, so what I am writing here is either conjecture or something I overheard. The women pictured here were dressed in similar but not identical outfits, pale tan or grey and loose-fitting. They laughed and posed for one member of their group after another. Something about them made me imagine that they were members of a religious community on a holiday. A less enthusiastic pair of visitors pictured here reminded me of the bored but accommodating husbands you often see in a mall, sitting on a bench while their wives shop. In this case they had actually paid for the privilege, but they might have been thinking that one flower is pretty much like every other—and at this site there were probably hundreds of thousands of them. A group of at least a dozen young Mennonite women walking with an older man and woman attracted a lot of attention. I was drawn to the pink Crocs and digital cameras which somehow seemed inconsistent with the plain or spartan lifestyle I usually associate with their beliefs. I couldn’t help thinking that at $25 each, they had paid a whopping sum at the ticket gate. Still, the gardens themselves were what enthralled me, and I’ll be writing about them and putting up a gallery of plants soon.