BaDa Bloom! Tulips Everywhere!

The Okanagan’s New Tulip Festival is a Field of Dreams for Alexis Szarek.
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I’ve always wanted to go to a tulip festival but the big flower displays in Ottawa or B.C.’s Lower Mainland were too far from my home in Calgary. So, imagine my delight when I heard the Abbotsford Tulip Festival was moving to the north Okanagan. I had so many questions. When would it start? How do you move thousands of tulips? (Short answer, you don’t) What would it look like?

In early May I headed to Bloom’s Tulip Festival in Armstrong, British Columbia to see if the first Okanagan tulip festival provided the flower power I’d dreamed off.

Scoring tickets for the “Magic Hour” I was eager to photograph in the early morning light. I was less enthused when I discovered Magic Hour started at 5:30 a.m. But early mornings aren’t alien to birdwatchers like myself, and I pulled into the parking lot at the same time as staff opened the gates.

White-crowned sparrows sang along the pathway to 2.5 acres of tulips. Having the place to myself I scurried about, admiring the vivid pink and red ribbons of flowers stretching to the horizon. There were photo props tucked amongst twenty tulip varieties and I could imagine families or young children posing for photos as the day unfolded.

Tulips have special meaning for me. My father fought in WWII as a wireless operator on a RAF Lancaster Bomber. He survived many bombing raids before participating in the Manna Mission, his plane carrying food instead of bombs, flying low over Rotterdam to drop bags of flour to the Dutch starving under German occupation. My dad would tell me years later about a fellow electrician he met in Regina after the war who’d grown up in Rotterdam and had been a kid gathering bags on the airstrip that day. “We were so hungry,” he explained, grateful for my dad and other people’s actions. In 1945 the Dutch Royal Family presented Canada 100,000 tulip bulbs as thanks for sheltering some of its citizens and helping to liberate the Netherlands.

It seems tulips are special as well to festival creator, Alexis Szarek, a third-generation flower grower who started the Abbotsford festival with help from her father. Displaying plenty of her own agritourism business savvy, she won the 2016 Abbotsford Business Excellence Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. She held four successful festivals inspired by her grandfather Peter Warmerdam, who immigrated from the Netherlands with horticultural knowledge.

Catching up with Szarek, her handheld radio crackling with staff queries as she directed the day’s activities, I was delighted to discover the tulip bulbs planted for the festival came from Holland. Szarek outlined her reasons for moving the festival. Having planted all the bulbs for the 2020 season before the pandemic struck, she’d invested all her funds except for the labour bill. And then had to close.

“My husband and I had always talked about moving to the Okanagan and at the time we had one daughter and I was pregnant with our second. And you know when things are going really well it’s hard to just pick up and move, but when things don’t go so well maybe this is a sign it would be a good time to do that (move). And it was the best decision for our family,” expounded Szarek.

The festival is smaller in its new location. Where 100,000 people would come to the festival each year in the Lower Mainland, Szarek is drawing from communities in the Okanagan and Alberta and expected fewer visitors. “I would like to build it to about 15 to 20 thousand people. We’re almost at 8,000 tickets sold so far. In Abbotsford I did 10 acres in blooms and it just doesn’t pay to plant that many if you’re not going to see the same volumes of people.”

The smaller acreage still yielded plenty of colourful views, something I’d worried about given the amount of snow falling when I made my travel arrangements from Calgary days earlier. There are different growing conditions and climate in the festival’s new home and Szarek has had to adapt. “Armstrong itself is about two to three weeks behind Abbotsford,” Szarek described, “And then it has been the coldest spring. On Monday there was snow! So, we’re even more than the two or three weeks behind than I thought we would be but it’s not forecast to get hot. That’s my biggest concern when you’re growing tulips. This kind of weather, the tulips like it!”

The spring tulip festival ends after three weeks but Szarek is considering a you-dig day when the tulips are finished. “If we left them there, they would grow next year but there would be bulb rot,” she said, pondering the possibility of letting people salvage bulbs before they till the soil in preparation for next year’s tulip display.

I’d walked from the parking lot to the flowers, but on weekends, horse-drawn carriages also shuffle back and forth to the flowers. A food truck was setting up their kitchen as Magic Hour wound down, and my stomach started to rumble. I spotted fresh asparagus for sale at the nearby barn that looked tasty. As she handed me my greens, the vendor explained it can grow 15 centimeters in a day!

That kind of growing conditions keeps the valley blooming and I promised myself I’d be back, perhaps for the 20-acre sunflower festival Szarek has planned for August.

For more info visit bloomflowerfestivals.com , and BTW, the 2023 Tulip Festival is expanding to four acres!

Back in the Saddle – backcountry trail riding near Banff

Restored 1945 Lancaster Bomber Flight