Skagit Valley Tulips

It’s been a long time since I’ve visited the tulips and didn’t necessarily have plans to go back any time soon. However, the tulips are a well-known destination in this area each April and it made sense to see what I could capture.   As I was researching this trip, I learned of an opportunity for photographers to have special access at Tulip Town, one of the two farms that charge admission. For a not very minimal fee, photographers are able to enter the farm between 6:00-8:00 am and wander without limits during that time and again after closing. The advantage is to be there for sunrise and sunset and to actually go into the fields, which are not available for the general public. In fact, the photographers take on general public status when the public arrives, through closing ,when they are again able to wander the fields until sundown. It was worth paying the photographer fee and getting up so early to be there at those special times during the day. Watching the sunrise over the tulips was a bit like watching a rainbow gradually reveal itself as the sun slowly moved upward over the mountains.

The other activity that begins before the public arrives is picking the tulips for sale. A squadron of tulip pickers comb through each row to select and harvest flowers that are at a very specific point in their maturity. They work in teams with one or two pickers and a transporter. The pickers bundle each group of 10 blooms with rubber bands and hand the bunches to the transporter.  This person carries multiple bunches to the flat crates that are built at just the right height to safely hold the tulips, while at the same time allows the crates to be stacked on top of each other without damaging any of the tulips.

The ability to wander through the fields gave me the chance to photograph inside the rows and be able to choose individual flowers that were not necessarily accessible at the rows’ ends, where the general public was limited to. I enjoy most taking photos of things up close – very close. That’s not something one considers very often when taking pictures of tulip fields.

Seeing rows of color is very different than being able to identify distinctive shapes and shades, all within a vast collection of flowers of the same variety and color. And every once in a while, a single flower of a contrasting color appears where it doesn’t belong, yet it stands out like a soldier at attention in the midst of a parade. 

I spent several hours at this farm before I was ready to leave and explore other tulip fields. This vast agricultural area seems to be in between seasons right at this time.  The tulips are blooming in many locations, and in others the fields are totally bare. But one knows intellectually that many seeds have been planted and soon tiny seedlings will show their little heads and those fields will turn from brown to green, and change from flat soil to robust fields of vegetables, fruits and herbs that will be available for us to enjoy.  

Tulips have interesting histories and were highly valued for hundreds of years, especially in Holland. They were first imported to Holland from the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. When an unnamed tulip farmer wrote a book about tulips their popularity grew like wildfire. In the late 1500’s and early 1600’s the author’s garden became the object of frequent raids to steal the bulbs.  

Have you heard of the Great Tulip Bubble?  The Dutch tulip bulb market bubble was one of the most famous market bubbles and crashes of all time. It occurred in Holland during the early to mid 1600s when speculation drove the value of tulip bulbs to extremes. At the height of the market, the rarest tulip bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person's annual salary. Today, the Bubble serves as a parable for the pitfalls that excessive greed and speculation can lead to.

I read multiple different accounts of how Skagit Valley became one of the leading tulip growing areas in the country.  George Gibbs, came from England when he was 17 and settled on Orcas Island. Around 1892 he bought a bunch of tulip bulbs for $5.00.  Several years later, when he dug them up, he saw they had multiplied and realized tulips could be a very profitable business. Ultimately George moved to Bellingham and in 1899 he started working with U.S. Department of Agriculture. In1905 the USDA sent 15,000 bulbs from Holland as an experiment which was very successful.  Soon George was raising Dutch-bred tulip bulbs under contract with the USDA. The first northwest tulip festival was actually born in Bellingham in 1920, but the Great Depression in 1929 and the bulb freezes that occurred in 1916, 1925 and 1929 shut down the festival and George Gibbs moved his home, his farm and his tulips to Skagit Valley.

According to the Skagit County Historical Museum Mary Brown Stewart was the first to bring tulips to the Skagit Valley.  Mary ordered the first tulip bulbs from Holland, planting the first one in 1906. She and her husband William had 40 acres of land on which she grew her tulips. Her tulips’ popularity multiplied and eventually she started a small mail-order bulb business.  She is credited with starting the county’s tulip bulb industry.  Mary and William’s son Sam and his wife Sarah opened the first tulip farm in the county in 1930, the Tulip Grange Bulb Farm.  By 1947 they were able to ship flowers all over the country directly by plane from Skagit County. After Sam’s death in 1972, the farm was sold to the American Bulb Company.

The Skagit Valley is home to 350 acres of tulips.  The Tulip Festival, which started in 1984 and lasted for only three days, recently drew visitors from all 50 states and 93 foreign countries. The Festival and its glorious fields are now available to visitors for the whole month of April. From my house, it’s just over an hour drive to the fields; even closer than the Canadian border. And definitely worth the drive.