A contained Tulip Festival

The weather was not kind to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival this year.  The chilly spring and non-stop drizzle delayed the tulip blooms quite a bit. Whereas during many years you could drive up there in the mid-April and see acres and acres of brilliant color that looked like you could set sail on and float across a sea of red, this year, it wasn’t quite to be.

When my Mother and I took the drive up there one afternoon, there was plenty of green, and the occasional spot of yellow as the Daffodils made their last stand, the tulip blooms remained scarce.

Fortunately, we still got to experience the reds and purples of the Roozengaarde display gardens. The contained and disciplined gardens showcase a variety of blooms and it was a enough of a tulip fix for the year.
 
I shot these images using the same macro lens I brought to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show.
This is just a sampling of the pictures from that day.  You can find more of my pictures from that day here, on my Flickr page.

Of course it was drizzling that day, which made walking in the nature more complicated, but it did do some interesting things to the flowers. The water droplets clung to the tulips as though they feared being soaked up by the ground.

They also did something that’s I’d only every seen on CSI. They captured the reflection of neighboring plants, the sky, and me. Granted, it was more of a silhouette and a bit distorted. It would never result in my conviction for anything, but it was still quite cool. 

I’m not sure how well that translates to the small image posted in Blogger; you may need to open the images to their full size on Flickr to check it out (Image 1, Image 2, Image 3).

In this shot, I used the flash.  It made the water droplets on the ruffled petal edges sparkle like an artificial, fiber optic Christmas tree. It’s a little challenging to see it in this post, but you can see a larger version here.

I was able to get very tight on this one.

They did some creative stuff with the flowers, creating a blue river of Irises through the beds.

It wasn’t the wide swaths of color I’d seen in previous years, but it was still worth the visit.
You can find posts from previous visits to the Tulip Festival here:

Tulips and Hail

Tulip Festival -- 2006

And you can find more pictures from various years here.