Spring is Here...and so are the Tulips

The best springtime destination in the whole wide world for someone with a camera in hand is Washington State's Skagit Valley tulip fields. Monday this week, sun breaks and towering clouds coincided to make perfect lighting and background for fields ablaze with color. A chilly wind thinned the crowds so that parking, often a nightmare, was not a problem.

We pulled off Best Road and parked where tulips nearly inundated this old barn.

Artists were out, and who could blame them?

Fields of rainbows rolled away for what looked like a mile, ending at Beaver Marsh Road and the RoozenGaarde display garden.

Sometimes the best beauty is the least noticed!

Don't walk between the rows. Not only might you lose your shoes in the mud, you might damage the flowers. The top layer of mud had dried on the road, but the ground moved beneath our feet as if we walked on a mattress.

Children and tulips...a perfect combination.

Parrot tulips have their own weird beauty.

Part of the display garden, with acres of daffodils in the background.

Pattern, design, color...beauty in the details.

Generous bystanders offered to take our picture.

RoozenGaarde was established in 1985 by the Roozen family, whose patriarch, William Roozen, emigrated from Holland in 1947. He found the Skagit Valley to be perfect for growing the bulbs he'd grown in Holland. Today the family business is the largest grower of tulips, daffodils, and irises in the world.

There are more than 1000 acres of blooming fields, 15 acres of greenhouses, and a 4-acre display garden which is completely redesigned each autumn and replanted with over a quarter million spring flowering bulbs.

Bulbs are shipped all over the world. My sister-in-law in Marysville tells of the year she ordered bulbs from Holland and waited eagerly for them to arrive. When the shipment finally reached her, the label on the package proudly announced, "Grown in the Skagit Valley of Washington."