Don't forget that tulips are poisonous for cats and are a favorite food for rabbits, so consider pot plantings if you’d like to add some of these colorful flowers to your own home garden!
Norfolk Master Gardeners
830 Southampton Ave., Ste 2069
Norfolk, Virginia 23510-1045
Blog Post
Touring the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival
By Jill Lewis, ’17 • Jul 16, 2021
Skagit County, Washington (pronounced Skajit), is located 60 miles north of Seattle and 60 miles south of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival celebrated its 38th year in 2021. The festival was cancelled last year and scaled down this year, but the tulips continued to bloom. The two main gardens, Roozengarde and Tulip Town, each has nearly 1000 acres in the county. It’s not all dedicated to tulips, but each garden contains over five acres of tulip fields in the display gardens. They claim to be the largest seller of tulip and daffodil bulbs in the world!
The Tulip Festival is normally a month-long event which features not only tulips but food, crafts, local events, and everything garden. Many events were not held during this year’s truncated festival. There was, however, a farm drive, which included local dairies, vineyards, restaurants, bakeries, and some farm stands (April in this part of Washington is like early March in Virginia). While the towns, La Conner, Anacortes and Mount Vernon are small tourist towns with a few streets of commercial activity, much of the rest of the county is very rural and picturesque.
The mail order site, tulips.com, sells over a hundred varieties of tulip, daffodil, hyacinth, and narcissus bulbs, all locally grown. Bulbs are ordered in spring and summer for fall delivery and planting. The catalog features beautiful pictures of spring in the Skagit Valley. Interestingly, the fields are replanted every year, so you will never see the same display from year to year.
Of course, the best part for us was sharing this experience with my daughter Lydia, son-in-law John, and my first grandchild, Mia, who is very patient with grown-up activities. I’d be happy to share my catalog or official brochure or lots of pictures of Mia!
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