Joy in the Tulip Fields

Springtime is rejuvenating, and little enthralls me the way a visit to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival does. I can well understand Tulipomania, the Dutch phenomenon in the 1630s that led to wild speculative prices for particularly hoarded hybrids. Here in the Northwest, many await the opening of the tulip cups with similar enthusiasm, and this year we've waited longer than I can remember--Al Gore's Global Warming brought us an icier winter that delayed the fields' splendor nearly a month.

But we who consult Tulip Maps like astrologers plot the planets were overjoyed to find this weekend peak. And so my husband, son and I got in the car, singing along with oldies, and drove the hour north of Seattle to the Mount Vernon flats.

Unfortunately, pent-up eagerness for the flowers' bloom brought out masses of fans of fringed, parrot, Triumph and double (a great number of them, for reasons I can't really understand, East Indian, many in sparkly saris and other delightfully-hued garb). Out in the fields, where narrow roads transverse open acres, cars were lined up helplessly, stopped dead for quarter-hours at a time. We were among them, frustrated. But quiet about it.

The sun wove between the clouds and haze, and even infrequent advancement was bearable on a Sunday where your fellow traffic victims join you in such a pleasant purpose. Admittedly, Skagit Valley is far less hospitable in its April display than it had been in the early years we attended, 1996, 7 and 8. In those days, more farmers opened up their fields freely. Cars parked alongside the fields or on the host's turf; there were no fluorescent-orange-vested traffic directors, no ticket booths, no merchants offering $6 packs of tulip-themed paper napkins, lawn pinwheels or imported-from-China trivets painted with quaint European street scenes.

There was an art show in a a barn (which continues) and a grower who let kids pet his tame alpacas. More family farms carried on the Dutch flower-growing traditions, and welcomed yours to stroll into the field, gawk at the rows of color, and chat a bit.

Now, only two farms remain, and they've made tulip-admiration into almost as big a business as bulb-vending. Parking lots are cordoned off into rows, and entering the fields or displays requires a fee, $4 at Roosengaarde, and $5 at Tulip Town. Cut flowers and especially, bulbs, offered with "deals" like a fifth bunch free, or 20 extra bulbs when ordering others, are for sale by plentiful clerks. Kiosks for Kettle Corn, corn dogs, nachos and other fair fare provide a pungency more conducive to nausea than communing with nature.

But pass the distractions and there are the flower fields. Even when lined with tourists, God provides there a breathtaking spectacle. Astonishing rainbow rows of intense color bring smiles, gratitude and praise. Families squat, smiling, arms linked for the camera, among the sturdy stems, vibrant bowls of vivid petals enveloping them, joining them together in exhilaration.

Everyone is snapping photos, eager to capture the intensity, the brilliance, the astounding beauty. I've made the tulip pilgrimage many times; how many ways can you photograph a flower? "Say cheese!" "Don't move!" my verdant subject cooperates and I giggle, grateful for digital cameras and giant photo storage. It's all here for the imbibing, the enjoying.

That's why the interminable traffic was bearable. Little is troubling when God colors the world.

Tulips in my Own Back Yard

Every year, our family makes the hour-and-ten-minute drive northward to Washington's Skagit Valley to see the annual Tulip Festival. It is the highlight of my year, signaling the advent of springtime, and renewing in me the exhilaration of the outdoors, as a gasp-worthy display of brilliant blooms undulates with the boggy terrain spread to the ends of a massive valley. If anything can revive a perfunctory relationship with God, it is this mega-dose of grandeur and beauty--stripes of intense reds, yellows, purples under a cerulean sky of lilting clouds.

My photographer's eye dances from one shot to its superior. My photographed children grimace. Eleven years ago, when we first made our tulip trek, they were cooperative, posing in the rows of flowers, their own fresh bloom happy and perfect. Over the years, however, they grew weary of this ritual, and ever more reluctant to smile while squatting in the mud. This was, of course, frustrating to me as I switched from film to digital, since now I could click unlimitedly, putting them to ever greater duress and torture.

This year, to my consternation, we missed the Tulip Festival entirely. The flowers came out two weeks late, I was deep into writing deadlines, and Passover inserted its 10-day interlude, when we were in Los Angeles, far from the swaying color-cups of the Skagit.

But--we grew tulips in pots on our patio! And one closeup of a tulip is as good as another! So, I took photos of the flowers. But, sigh, not of my squatting children, who now are much more assertive about refusing to fulfill their mother's wish.

There is no way to capture the beauty of the the tulip fields, and no way to recapture the children who skipped through the dirt aisles picking up broken flowers, collecting them into a bouquet and presenting them to me. Come on, Mom, time to move on. Here's a glimpse of my patio...

Tiptoe thru the Skagit Valley Tulips with me

It's tulip time in the Great Northwest, and those of you in other parts of the world--unless it's Holland--probably don't know exactly what that means. Visitors come from all over the globe to see the Skagit Valley's fields of brilliant blooms, in colors so shockingly vibrant that your immediate reaction is to thank Hashem for the ability to see them. For our family, a trek to The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival (April 1-30) is an annual event. Over the years, the children have perhaps had more than their fill of their mother's insistence that they squat down level with the blooms in the bouncy clay unique to the fields for my incessant photos. They used to enjoy this family outing, picking up the stray decapitated tulip to make bouquets, running down the lanes between the brilliant stripes of color, and cheerfully poking their heads through the plywood stand-ups of dutch maidens, with tulips behind, stretching in eye-popping rows to the horizon. As they got older, they'd temper their grousing if they could bring a friend, and lately, they grumble and consider the opportunity to view this most beautiful and miraculous demonstration of Hashem's generosity as merely my cruel need for them to pose for photos. (Happily, my eldest daughter has gained renewed enthusiasm for the tulips, since living in New York, where the most picturesque sights in her Midtown neighborhood are the mobs of women snatching up dresses at H & M to sell later on EBay.)

Last Sunday, my husband cajoled our son to accompany us and some family friends on our 2007 Tulip Trek. The hour ride from our home northward is spectacular, with stands of majestic firs, winding rivers, fields, mountains and even a pocket where you can count on freakishly horrid weather before emerging on the other side to sunshine. Once at tulip headquarters in Mt. Vernon, picked a couple years ago by Rand McNalley as "the most liveable town in America," we followed the eager hoardes beyond the modest city limits--its 1920s fading storefronts only half-Yuppified--to the wide open fields. Straight, two-lane roads criss-cross the terrain, which is hospitable to tulips as it is low-lying and often floods in the winter, leaving fertile beige mud with huge air bubbles trapped just beneath the surface. Walking on this earth is springy, in the most peculiar way, with each step giving and then popping you up.

Our first stop was Tulip Town, which, when we began our tulip mania a decade ago, was open fields with free entry, a few porta-potties and a food trailer near the parking aisles just off the road. It was a spectacular day, temperatures near 60, with the sun strong through fluffy white puff-clouds. They say that photographing the tulips is better in overcast, as the bright sun makes harsh shadows, but the happiness of the light made the day all the more festive. Tulip Town is now an "attraction," with three-dollar admission, all sorts of confections and fair-food, vendors of artwork and kites and crafts, and the centerpiece--a long building with huge sprays of each type of tulip, which may be purchased for delivery in September as bulbs to plant in your garden.
Tulip Town is the business of Dutch immigrants, the DeGoede family, passed down through generations now. (http://www.tuliptown.com/history.htm) At the very entrance to the fields, prominent from the first time we visited, is a mural on the side of a building of the fields in bloom, with a banner proclaiming, "To God Goes the Glory." The present DeGoedes running the farm, Anthony and Jeannete, were featured in a big article in the Seattle Times because they have created an official International Tulip Peace Garden. Jeannete explained that they are simple people who don't really understand politics but disdain war, and they felt that a garden flying 16 flags and displaying 60 varieties of tulips could be their statement along the lines of motorist Rodney King's, "Can't we all just get along?" In the garden is a replica of DeGoede Village Windmill, and a mini Statue of Liberty. The Peace Garden is too hokey to express, but in its noble purpose, sweet as the wholesome families who come to pose their children amongst the flowers.

Then there are the tulip fields...the most magnificent flowers with their variety of shapes, richness of colors and vast stripes of hue splashing across the landscape. With the sunshine illuminating them, the petals glisten, becoming translucent, softly bobbing in the crisp breeze. But the sun is so warm, no one needs a coat. The rows of red flowers (inside each a pattern of bright yellow and black, unseen) give way to canary yellow, then pink, then dark purple, nearly black. Tulips' petals can be fringed, as if clipped with nail scissors into short tines. They can have pointy petals, striped, or two or three-toned. The magnificence of each flower is only enhanced when you peek inside to discover its uniquely patterned secret.

After a walk around the fields--perhaps a mile--and a spin around the displays, we get in the car again to visit Roozengarde, the second major tulip destination in the Skagit Valley. Roozengarde is famed for its beautifully planted display gardens, where the bulbs they sell are arranged so that they continuously bloom during the festival (there are early, mid and late-blooming varieties). Amongst the tulips are planted hyacinths, whose heady fragrances are so thick you gasp. And daffodils, in startlingly delicate and happy configurations (double, triple, oranges, creams, two-toned, whites--and traditional yellows of all sorts). Roozengarde also has a windmill, and lovely old rail-fencing that provides a beautiful backdrop. They have the concessions too--kettle corn, hot dogs, and of course their own area for selling tulip bulbs. My husband picks out and purchases them--250 bulbs this year--and then takes me through the gardens showing me his selections. He knows my favorites are the parrot tulips--with their twisted shapes and wild marbled colors that have been induced by giving the plants an actual virus.

As you can see, I'm wild about tulips. And nothing brings me so close to ecstacy as a sunny day with my family and good friends walking the tulip fields and snapping photos. I know that the breathtaking pictures I take are interchangeable, year-to-year--you've seen one amazingly gorgeous flower, you've seen 'em all. But I can't stop taking pictures because I just want to capture the beauty, capture the moment--I don't want to ever lose the exhilaration of spring in full flower, of life in full-bloom.