City Walks – Flowers in the Park

A Neighborhood That Plants Together Stays Together

Before I start, if you haven’t read Loveshaq’s post on the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival then go now and see where tulips come from. Loveshaq’s photos are astonishing. What you’ll see here are where some of those bulbs that are grown commercially eventually end up.

About a 15 minute walk from my house is a ritzy neighborhood with century-old homes. Possibly the biggest house in that neighborhood once belonged to an oil exec who owned extensive, well manicured grounds. When he died, the neighborhood association bought much of his property, expanded his gardens, and turned them into a public park. Every year, volunteers from the neighborhood work on the grounds, digging and separating old bulbs, pruning trees, and yanking weeds.

Earlier every spring daffodils and hyacinths dominate. Here you can see a bed of hyacinths, which have been infiltrated by invasive celadine (buttercups). You can imagine how powerful they smelled.

Here you can see a bed of daffodils beneath cherry trees, and behind them is a bed of tulips sending out immature blooms, and further back is the mansion that once belonged to the oil exec.

But everyone in my city can tell you this park is defined, above all else, by the tulips that burst forth when the daffodils and hyacinths are spent.

On a warm day with tulips in bloom the park is packed with people who came here as kids, with college students who have been clued in to the local experience they’d better not miss during their brief stint in town, with parents sharing the experience with their kids, with friends sharing a bottle of wine and a loaf a bread with friends.

Oh, the tulips. For a week, ten days, two weeks, depending on the whims of sun and rain and wind, the tulips are out.

Here you can see an expecting couple with a younger child in a stroller, surrounding themselves with tulips and cherry blossoms as they await a coming baby.

Here you see a tree my kids climbed until they were dozens of feet above the ground — like generations of kids before them — under the watchful eyes of parents and grandparents who worried, just a little, that they might slip and fall to the ground, though they never did, because the tree, somehow, was always the right size for a child to climb.

Last week I wrote about an artist who took it upon herself to create mosaic butterflies to bring her neighborhood together. And a few miles away, for fifty years, neighbors have been tending to this garden to bring people together as well.

The tulips, oh, the tulips.