Tulip Festival at Skagit Valley

ROOZENGAARDE

Visited on: 21st April 2013

The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is the largest festival in Northwest Washington State. Spring is the season when the Skagit Valley shows her colors. Each year more than 1 million visitors come to experience over 300 acres of brightly colored tulips.

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival was held from April 1-30. We visited it on the third week of April. The weather dint look good that day. It was drizzling. It almost always rains in Seattle! It was predicted that after 3pm it will be sunny. But still we hoped that at Skagit valley the weather will be fine. We reached Skagit valley around 10:00 am. And it was actually wasn’t raining there! The sky was partially clouded and partially blue. We had two options to choose from- the RoozenGaarde and Tulip Town.

 We chose the RoozenGaarde. Roozengaarde was established in 1985 by the Roozen family and Washington Bulb Company, Inc. The Roozen family business of growing Tulips, Daffodils and Irises is the largest in the world, covering Skagit Valley with more than 1200 acres of field blooms and 15 acres of greenhouses. It had a tulip field and a tulip garden on opposite sides of the road. We bought tickets. It was $5 per person. The field was muddy. We had to walk very carefully. It was my first visit to any tulip festival. The tulip field was mesmerizing. It was a perfect picture spot. There were different variety of colors. Red, yellow, purple, red and white, red and yellow… It seemed as if the tulips were participating in a beauty contest and were posing for the photographers. We took lots of snaps of the beautiful flowers. To me the red ones looked the best. We walked between the rows and posed for photos. The sun was playing hide and seek. Sometimes it peeped out and sometimes got hid behind the clouds. The sun made the flowers look brighter and happier. The field looked like the heaven on earth. I wish I had a house in the middle of the field and wake up every morning and be greeted by the bunch of tulips.

Next we went to the garden across the road. We got to see more colors there. Pink, white, blue, red, yellow, orange….all possible combinations of colors were there. There the flowers were arranged in a more organized way. All the colors of rainbow was there. The arrays of tulips looked stunningly beautiful. It was the best garden I had ever seen. The colorful floral arrangement is like a soothing balm to an aching mind & soul. You ought to say “wow”, “amazing”, “wonderful”…. and smile when you see them. Apart from the tulips there were other flowers too. There was field of daffodils behind the garden. They looked gorgeous. It reminded me of the poem “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils…… “

 It started raining all of a sudden. We were carrying an umbrella but still took shelter inside a shop in the garden. They were selling tulip bulbs and other souvenirs like magnets, postcards, t-shirts etc.. The collection at the store was good. We left from there around 12:30 and headed towards Deception Pass, which was also amazing.