The fertility rituals of spring really took a beating with the rise of formal religions. We still have a faint version at the beginning of May.
We can be thankful that we still have spring flower celebrations. The Keukenhof festival features over 7 million flowers starting in March and concluding in May. Holland is the great flower trade capital of the world, so you can imagine their show-off festival. The Dutch don't spend very much time on garden plants. The industry focuses on pot plants and cut flowers. And aren't Lilies a great demonstration of that focus. From the 1980s through to now, many hybrids have been developed - all and every to put into a pot or a bouquet. But we can be very thankful for their focus, getting those gorgeous oriental lilies like Casablanca (every white oriental lily seems to attract that name) and Stargazer (every pink oriental lily seems to get that name).
Once you've seen a tulip festival, it becomes infectious. That's how I explain the tulip festivals around the world now. The Ottawa Tulip Festival, the Canberra Festival, Skagit Valley, Istanbul, Tesselaar Festival in Australia, Albany, N.Y. , Srinagar in Kashmir, India, Tonami Tulip Fair in Japan.
Wikipedia says that the largest tulip festival is Ottawa's. Maybe they are don't like the expansiveness of Keukenhof - too many types of bulbs and plants in that festival.
Tulips, like many bulbs, have 3 seasons of bloom - the early, the mid and the late bloomers. Early tulips, like Fostering, can handle the cold and even frost and a bit of snow, but fade out as soon as there's heat. Compare that to late varieties, like Lily-flowered tulips which can bloom into mid-June in warm temperatures.
If it weren't for the squirrels, voles, rabbits, and chipmunks, I would have a tulip festival each year. Only daffodils so far this year, despite all that planting of tulips in the past. I'll get to see thousands of tulips soon as Niagara has taken on the tourist challenge and we have a few festivals now. They start in the next week or so.
Remember this picture? Last year's festival at Seventh and Fourth Streets St. Catharines. That's right around the corner from 13th Street Winery. Go pick up an espresso and a butter tart, and then roam the fields of tulips!
No comments:
Post a Comment