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Perhaps thinking of their stomachs as well as being practical minded, the
British Royal Marine Light Infantry first planted a vegetable garden on
the spot shortly after arriving on Garrison Bay in March 1860. The camp
site then was a tangle of vegetation shooting up wildly from an enormous
shell midden created over the centuries around an ancient Salish village.
The marines leveled the snowy-white mounds of shells to create a parade
ground and used one especially fertile spot for the garden.
By 1867, a new commander, Captain William A. Delacombe, arrived
accompanied by his wife and children. With a larger vegetable garden
already underway elsewhere in the camp, Delacombe decided to use the
original site for a formal garden in the “Gardenesque” style developed in
the early 1800s by John Claudius Loudon, an English horticulturist and
writer on landscape design. Not only would the garden remind the
captain’s family of home thousands of miles away, it would provide a
clear, yet gentle boundary between enlisted and officer territory. |
