I Wet My Plants

Ottawa is home to the Tulip Festival, a three-weekend event held in the National Capital that symbolizes the friendship between Ottawa and the Netherlands. During the Second World War Canada provided safe haven for Netherlands’s Princess Juliana and her daughters during the Nazi occupation their homeland and a few year’s later they presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. Since then, Ottawa’s display of tulips has grown to over 3 million.

I decided to check out one of the Official Tulip Parks earlier this week on my lunch hour and headed over to Major’s Hill Park. On my way there was a cute ground hog hoofing it across steps of the War Memorial:

Entering Major’s Hill Park I saw lots of tulips:

Here you can see a stunning tulip bed:

Walking along I came across a collection of one hundred and fifty 5′ tulips, each painted by Ottawa and area visual artists during the 2005 Tulip Festival:

Some were really pretty:

Others abstract:

And others were very creative, especially this one that stood beside a row of portable toilets:

I think my favourite was this one mostly because I’m a fan of anything fish-themed:

Walking further I came across two of the tulip beds:

It was a nice way to spend my lunch hour and eventually I had to head back to work. Of course I had to take one more shot, especially with the Parliament Building’s Peace Tower in the background: