Tulip Festival

We were very privileged yesterday to visit the Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, Washington. It is the first time we’ve ever gone and we were not disappointed. There are over 700 acres of tulips there. What beauty! Here are just a few pictures.

A picture of our family after we walked around one field almost all afternoon and had taken 600+ pictures. I’m not kidding! The blessing of digital cameras I guess, is that you can just keep on snapping and snapping and you don’t run out of film or you know you can delete later, so no cost. I just wish I could share tons of them with you, but I picked out just a few. Not too sure if they were my favorites. I think so though. I think we could print a book of tulip pictures now though!

Pretty up close…

…and pretty far away.

One of the very exciting parts of our trip was that Zippy had just received her new camera that she had recently ordered after saving her money for quite some time. She took some of these pictures. She took the one above with the trees in it. I’m proud that she turned out some very fine pictures with her point-and-shoot. She also took the one below so that she could study more closely what the inside of the tulips were like.

We also learned about the tulip from the Handbook of Nature Study pages 552-555. We referred to Zippy’s picture above to see if it was described correctly. It was! Our tulip matched the description.

From the Handbook of Nature Study we learned that tulips originally came from the Orient and were real popular in Persia where they were cultivated as early as 1000 A.D. Eventually they made their way to Europe where everybody fell in love with them, but especially the Dutch. According to the Handbook of Nature Study, the highest price paid for a tulip, during the "Tulipmania" was $1800, but we found a website called Tulip Fever that claimed that the highest price ever paid was by a Turk named Sultan Ahmed III who was beheaded for spending too much on tulips. A head in exchange tulips, I would say, takes the prize. While we read about the tulips the kids added pictures of them to their nature journals.

Left is Zippy’s (age 9). Right is JD Boy’s (age 6).

And last but not least, a favorite shot of me and my littlest man. His big brother and sister have been working on making nature journals of the things they observe in the outdoors, so they took theirs out to the tulip fields. He wasn’t to be left out. He proudly took his in his new turtle backpack and at one point just sat down on the road to draw a picture of the tulip fields. It was so cute. He was being such a big kid. Guess I’d better stop gushing though.

We heard that sometimes tulips are exported to Holland from these fields, but I did some looking around on the internet and have found conflicting reports on this. Some say that Holland will not import tulips and that the US imports from Holland. Others say that at some time in the past tulips were exported to Holland from here. Maybe they’re both true. Maybe there was one year that something happened to tulips in Holland, and so there was an exception. I don’t know. Most of the sites said that Holland will not import. All in all, it was beautiful. Now, if we could just visit a tulip festival in Holland!