##Nicholas and Peggy’s garden love affair##
**Abkhazi Garden**
This small Victoria paradise—with pathways winding under Garry oaks, rivers of heather and ancient spruces cascading over lichened stone—is the legacy of Marjorie (Peggy) Pemberton-Carter and Nicholas Abkhazi. She was a peripatetic orphan who travelled extensively with her adoptive mother and ended up in Shanghai; he was an exiled Georgian prince. They first met in Paris in the 1920s and stayed in touch until the Second World War ended their communication. After the war was over, Peggy used traveller’s cheques she had hidden in a tin of talcum powder to go to Victoria, where she bought the
rocky acre of land and built a small house. A determined Nicholas traced her and
they were reunited—and married—in 1946. The couple devoted the next 40 years
to creating this exquisite garden, which they called their “child” (indeed it was their only child). Really several gardens in one, it boasts woodlands, sun-filled borders, ponds, waterfalls and carefully planted rockeries on an amazing variety of levels. Nicholas died in 1987 and Peggy in 1994, at the age of 92. Rescued from developers’ bulldozers, the garden is now maintained by The Land Conservancy and open to anyone who is touched by gardening love.
*1964 Fairfield Rd., Victoria, BC (250) 598-8096,*
conservancy.bc.ca.
conservancy.bc.ca.
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