Tulips and more

As I mentioned yesterday, on the way home from our hike we stopped by the RoozenGaarde tulip gardens, which were just green leaves when we visited them three weeks ago, and now they are heading toward peak viewing. (You can click any picture to enlarge, well worth your time.) Just give these tulips another week, and you won't be able to come by here on a sunny day during the weekend without sharing these views with thousands of spectators. RoozenGaarde has more than three acres of tulips all by themselves, and we passed farms with names like "Tulip Town" on the way.

The grounds are perfectly tended, with every conceivable variety of tulip to enjoy. That's Peggy and Ward in the background, and you can see by their clothes it wasn't warm. There was a light mist of rain in the air most of the time we were there, but every once in a while the sun tried to break through.

I captured these two unnamed ladies with their lovely umbrellas taking in the sights. To park and go inside the gardens, a small fee is charged, which will help to defray the costs of planting these tulips every year. In the picture below, you can see several more stripes of different varieties of tulips in the background. You will have to enlarge to see that easily.

 Not only were there tulips, but the hyacinths are in full flower, too. There were also some other tiny blue flowers I couldn't identify, until I found this on the RoozenGaarde site:

Many early and mid tulip varieties are now in bloom, in addition to all of the daffodil and hyacinth varieties. It would be unfair not to mention the Muscari (amongst other specialty flowers) as the little blue flowers are making an outstanding contribution to some of our most picturesque plantings. RoozenGaarde’s 3 acre display garden has been planted with more than 1/4 million tulip, daffodil, crocus, hyacinth and iris bulbs!

Some of the tulips are so different from anything I've seen before that if they didn't have the regular tulips leaves, I wouldn't know for sure what they are. This variety looks so much like a peony I was confused at first. It's called "Double Price" (not knowing if they are just especially expensive or why they have that name).

Some of the acres and acres of tulips are so intoxicating that I just couldn't figure an angle that might show you how gorgeous they are. I decided I'll make a special Flickr set of just flowers and put all 50 of the pictures I took up there. They will be linked on the right-hand side of my blog once I get that done. And to finish off this post, I thought this tulip looked as beautiful as any rose I have ever seen!

As you can see from these last two pictures, I was blessed to have the raindrops giving these beautiful tulips another dimension that you just can't ever get on sun-drenched days. There is perfection in all of our myriad weather delights here in the Pacific Northwest, including the rain.
:-)