It’s a cool spring here in Toronto, and things are late to flower; when they do, they hold on for a long time. My tulips have just started opening, but ten days ago I was lucky enough to tiptoe through gazillions of gorgeous tulips at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival in the Fraser Valley, about 73 kilometres (43 miles) from Vancouver, B.C.  I was there visiting my west coast family and my sister Bonnie, right, was kind enough to take me to the festival. So… natch… we asked a perfect stranger to take our picture.

Then we started touring.  This is the patch where visitors are allowed to pick their own tulip stems to buy to take home. Isn’t it fun?

People were very happy to be capturing a little of this floral joy.

And the cameras! From pros with tripods, to SLRs around necks, to every kind of cellphone camera, the shutterbugs were there.

Tulips have a long period of flowering, from the Single Early types and botanical tulips to the Single Late varieties. In a cool spring, tulips might flower for six weeks, but when temperatures warm up, so does the speed with which the tulips flower and fade. Fortunately for me our visit was perfectly timed at pleasant (not warm) temperatures for maximum bloom! And best of all, it was the kind of high overcast sky that I love for photography (and thanks to my sis for the photo below).

As for photography tips (and almost all of mine were made with my Samsung S8 cellphone), here are two images I made from my vantage point above. I think most people would agree that this one…..

….. is not as visually powerful as the one below. Why is that? While the one above captures the little mountains in the background and has a nice sense of vanishing point perspective, it’s a bit too easy on the eyes. The one below, by placing the angle of the tulip rows on the oblique and cutting out the far landscape but leaving the horizon showing, focuses attention on the spectacular geometry of the fields and the brilliant colour combinations of the tulips. That double magenta, by the way, is ‘Margarita’.

I caught Bonnie photographing the rose-flushed, light-pink Triumph tulip ‘Rosalie’…..

…. which is a lovely soft shade to use with mauves and lilacs.

One of my favourite tulips is the dramatic Single Late ‘Queen of Night’. I grow this one myself…..

….. and I liked the way it had cheekily intruded into this hot pink and orange mix.  Hello!!

Speaking of intruders, I think most of us secretly love it when a solid block of single-colour tulips is visited by an interloper – the tulip version of photo-bombing. This is the Single Late yellow ‘La Courtine’ in a bed of the magenta-pink Triumph ‘Milka’.

Tulip interiors like those of ‘Milka’ are fun to photograph. Defined as “perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes” (i.e. they come back every year, they’re herbs not shrubs, they grow from bulbs, and they have perennating, underground storage organs), tulips are members of the Lily Family, Liliaceae.

Tulips are native to parts of southern Europe and Central Asia (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and the other “stan”countries) and the name is believed to derive from the Persian word for turban, tuliband. Indeed, tulips were an essential part of the court of the Ottoman Empire, as this story from Amsterdam’s Tulip Museum recalls.

The Dutch, of course, have cornered the market in tulip-breeding. When we were in the Netherlands in 1998, we loved driving through the tulip fields near Lisse.

Those blocks of vibrant colour are so tantalizing. In 1885, Impressionist painter Claude Monet travelled in the Netherlands and painted The Tulip Fields and Rijnsberg Windmill.

As well, you can see tulips planted in beautiful combinations at spectacular Keukenhhof Gardens, which is the exhibition garden for numerous Dutch bulb-growers.

Here in Canada, I’ve been to the Ottawa Tulip Festival, which I wrote about in a previous blog.

But back to the Abbotsford Tulip Festival, here are some beautifully grown modern tulip bulbs. This is ‘Camargue’, a pink-streaked sport of the tulip ‘Menton’. It starts out pale yellow and ages to ivory-white.

‘Caravelle’ is a stunning tulip, a Single Late variety with beetroot-purple flowers. It was used in several mixed beds here at the festival as well.

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‘Happy Generation’, below, may look familiar to some. It was branded as a Limited Edition ‘Canada 150’ tulip during our country’s sesquicentennial in 2017, since it looks like the flame that burns at our parliament buildings in Ottawa.

I grow ‘Dordogne’ in my own garden – I love the gold and salmon tones in this tulip.

‘Flaming Parrot’ is a fine-feathered bird (as are all the Parrot tulips). It starts out with yellow in the colour mix and then fades to creamy-white and red.

It’s also fun to look into this one.

And here it is in a beautiful mixture at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival.

‘Spring Green’, below, is a Viridiflora Tulip.  Underneath it is a lovely tulip I grow in my garden…..

….. the deep-red 1942 Parrot Tulip ‘Rococo’.

Some combinations are unusual but work well, like the dark-mauve Fringed Tulip ‘Louvre’ with the salmon-flushed golden-yellow Darwin Hybrid Tulip ‘World Peace’.

‘Denmark’ is a strong, bicolour Triumph.

Pink and white make a pretty pairing – don’t know the names of these two.

Okay, I think we’ve taken the weird double tulip thing far enough. I don’t care if they look like  sundaes and someone named them ‘Ice Cream’ – please make this trend stop!

At the far end of the tulip fields, there was a windmill. Of course! And I had to pose.

There was also a basket, which we decided must be suggestive of a hot air balloon….? Or maybe bulb growers in the Netherlands carry bulbs in baskets? Anyway, we posed it that, too!

What fun people were having with their selfie sticks and walking up and down the paths with kids and grandparents.

Everyone was posing for the perfect tulips-and-me shot!

Wisely, the festival folks made it easy to get online publicity….. #colourinthecountry. And they have an online store too where you can order favourites.

But it was now time to go. I did love the brilliant displays with all their colourful geometry and such beautifully grown tulips, but……

…. as a gardener, I prefer to grow them not in soldier-like rows but mixed in with daffodils, small bulbs like Anemone blanda, crocuses, grape hyacinths (Muscari sp.), all set in a matrix of emerging perennials that will carry the garden throughout summer into autumn. And colour-wise, I do love a tulip party, thanks to my own bulb supplier pal Caroline de Vries.

In my garden, the tulip season begins with Darwin Hybrids and finishes with the Single Late tulips in a symphony of light-purple Camassia leichtlinii and Fothergilla gardenii. And that should all be happening any day now, if spring in Toronto would just warm up!