Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens
(formerly Tofino Botanical Gardens Sculpture Park)
Description
Tofino Botanical Gardens combines an interplay of cultivated gardens with a sculpture park, all as envisioned by founder and curator George Patterson. Meandering pathways lead you through the forest to the inlet side where the mudflats are home to shorebirds and local wildlife.
The sculpture park features one of the largest collections of Denman-Island based sculptor Michael Dennis, who works with salvaged old-growth cedar. This garden of earthly delights features an incredible range of work to discover from Mowry Baden’s whimsical and interactive kinetic sculpture to Jan Janzen’s driftwood gazebos, including the Storytelling Hut, and his wood sprite, Dryad, to Christen Dokk Smith’s Olmec Head. Patterson often works in collaboration with the artists.
George also commissioned a dugout canoe by Tla-o-qui-aht master carver Joe Martin, whose work you will also see featured at Tofino Tourism’s Visitor Centre. The interpretive panel which accompanies the canoe at the gardens involved a collaboration between Joe Martin’s daughters Tsmika Martin and Gisele Martin. It details Tla-o-qui-aht history of the dugout canoe and includes Tla-o-qui-aht Nuu-chah-nulth lanaguage.
There is an intriguing conversation between the art and its environment: Daniel Laskarin’s candy-apple red metal sculpture things come apart (2012) has begun to grow into the tree it leans on, Greg Snider’s oil industry protest sculpture skidder (1980) is juxtaposed near the peaceful duck pond, and Dan Law’s Celtic Hands (2017) reach up beseechingly between the medicinal flowers..
Artists Featured in the Gardens
Jan Janzen
Storytelling Hut
Gazebo
Sitting next to the duck pond, this bower’s “lower walls are sequentially assembled with no fasteners, like a Chinese puzzle, with the last piece being driven in with a sledgehammer.” Builders of the Pacific Coast, Lloyd Kahn. It provides the perfect vantage point to watch the ducks gliding across the water, shelter from the rain and sun and has even hosted small weddings.
Dryad
In the Greek tradition, a dryad is a tree or wood nymph, the spirit believed to inhabit a tree only for its lifetime, but here, is captured within this curvilinear cedar remnant. Artist Jan Janzen proposed this forest creature to curator George Patterson after completing the Storytelling Hut.
“When I went on a search for a likely piece of wood to begin a sculpture, I found the chunk of cedar that the ‘Dryad’ was carved from and it was absolutely perfect. I’d actually seen a dryad in the forest years ago, while camping on South Pender Island, and wanted to honour the being that allowed me to see it.The location/situation of the sculpture, half-hidden by bushes, and the silhouette of the face made of two-way mirrored glass echoes the near-invisibility of dryads and other fairy folk.”
Michael Dennis
Twelve of Them (1980) War Mask (1984)
Two Skulls (1986) The Couple (1990) Wild Dance (1990) Red Man Running (1995) The Babysitter (1995) Cycladic Dancer (2000) Eve and Adam (2002) Guardian (2002) Visitors (2004) Rough One (2006) Determined Woman (2008) Man and New Wife (2008) Observers (2008) Three Teachers (2009) Folly (2010) Five Figures (2012) Siren (2017)
