Tulips!

Trish and I recently enjoyed a week-long trip to Washington to explore some of the northwest coast and visit our son and daughter-in-law. One of our more colorful stops was the tulip fields of the Skagit Valley north of Seattle. This scene is from the Roozengaarde farm.

Each year, about 1,000 acres of tulips are grown in Skagit County, producing about 20 million bulbs that are harvested each summer. Another 75 million cut flowers are raised in greenhouses and fields. This is about 75% of all tulip production in the US.

Every April they have the famous Tulip Festival, drawing about 300,000 attendees (including us this year). Surprisingly, the tulip bulbs and flowers generate about $20 million in gross income, but the month-long Tulip Festival generates $65 million for the county.

The tulip, which is native to Central Asia, is in the lily family, and it is closely related to onions. Over a thousand years ago, tulips were cultivated in the Ottoman Empire (Turkish empire). The first bulbs were taken to Europe in 1556. In 1593, a botanist took tulips to the Netherlands. Tulips became extremely fashionable, and the wealthy paid high prices for them, leading to a period called Tulipomania (from 1634 to 1637). Eventually, tulips became affordable for the working class. They continue to be popular today.

Tulips include more than 150 species and over 30,000 varieties. Despite all that, any time Trish tries to plant tulips in our yard, the deer promptly bite them off at the ground level.