tulips tulips and more beautiful tulips

The Canadian Tulip Festival is upon us once again, here in the Nation's Capital.

Last Tuesday, after work, I picked Lilah up from kindercare and we headed over to Dow's Lake to breathe in their beauty, the scent, the colour of the tulips. They are always so beautiful and this year, yet again, they bloomed really quite early. I love Spring in Canada, mostly because I'm thrilled that big bad old Winter is over for a while! But also because it turns into Spring overnight around these parts. It almost seems like things pop up overnight - one day the trees are bare and the next day they are heavy with leaves. This past week, and even the day we visited the tulips, it was wet and warm... the perfect weather for Springtime growing!

Lilah enjoyed herself immensely - meandering around the little walks, checking out the tulips, racing me from one set of tulips to another and counting them of course...trying to, I should say! There were a few hundred more than she can handle right now!

Here's a little history on our annual Tulip Festival...

The Canadian Tulip Festival is a tulip festival, held annually in May in Ottawa, Canada. The festival claims to be the world's largest tulip festival, displaying over one million tulips. Large displays of tulips are planted throughout the city, and the largest display of tulips is found in Commissioners Park on the shores of Dow's Lake, and along the Rideau Canal with 300,000 tulips planted there alone. As well as tulip displays, the festival also includes music performances, speakers and exhibits of international cuisine.

In 1945, the Dutch royal family sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa in gratitude for Canadians having sheltered Princess Juliana and her daughters for the preceding three years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, in the Second World War.

The most noteworthy event during their time in Canada was the birth in 1943 of Princess Margriet to Princess Juliana at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. The maternity ward was declared to be officially a temporary part of international territory, so that she would be born in no country and would inherit only her Dutch citizenship from her mother. In 1946, Juliana sent another 20,500 bulbs requesting that a display be created for the hospital, and promised to send 10,000 more bulbs each year.

Taken from Wikipedia.

[ the flickr set is here ]