Mowing lawns, cleaning and posting birdhouses, yelling at the kids to stop picking my daffodils. Trying to avoid the tulips which are just starting this week. They are going to bloom by this weekend, which of course, is the Ottawa Tulip Festival.
Ottawa groans under the weight of thousands of tulips every year at this time. These gorgeous blooms (20 thousand!) are an annual reminder from the Dutch government that they remember not only the sacrifice of Canadian soldiers who had it really rough when liberating Holland during WWII, but also that the Dutch Royal Family was living out the occupation right here in Ottawa. In fact, Queen Julianna gave birth to princess Margriet right here in the Ottawa Civic Hospital in a room which was made Dutch soil for one day by an act of parliament.
The picture is of a very rare tulip called the "Bell Irving", named after the Canadian General Bell-Irving who lost Seventy Six Hundred men in Holland in 1944 and '45. They almost went extinct, mostly because for some reason, the local squirrels seem to particularly favor the bulbs. At one point, it was thought that it WAS extinct, but those Dutch are a canny lot, and a specialst collector in Holland had a couple hundred he was willing to propogate. He sent half of them to Canada for the 50th anniverary and they died enroute. Next year he sent another couple of hundred, and the squirrels got most of them. But they kept trying, and now the flower beds of Dow's lake and Bell Irvings's home town in British Columbia are awash with them. Not quite so rare now!
There is something uniquely Canadian that would make a flower be the memorial to a good general. A flower symbolic of the country he liberated, and one that is the colour of the poppy...the universal flower of the soldier.
5 comments:
Wow! I love tulips, and I love learning history, so thank you! That really is a gorgeous colored tulip.
Yeah, big tough Stag talking about flowers. Don't tell my class! I think it was reading about that family on your blog which put me in this mood....
Plus I have a lot of respect for a relatively unknown (to modern minds) general who was forced to do a job that couldn't be done. Bell-Irving had to roll up the coast against tough opposition all the while fighting through the mud of flooded farmland. Its not a story for the faint of heart. Like any general, there are things I cannot forgive him for. Using flamethrowers against the Hitler Youth was one of them. Stopping the advance to let Monty get ahead of him to get the glory, only to have the brits bog down at Arnhem (the Bridge Too Far) may have cost more than 700 Canadian lives. However, hindsight is 20-20. All in all, he made sure his troops got hot food. That was hard to do!
Those tulips have a black centre, and as they age, they open out and look a little like a poppy from above. And the colour is pretty distinctive....there are red tulips, but this rich dark red (made even darker by the dark core)is unique.
Tulips are not my favorite flower, though they ARE colourful, and tough. Crocuses are my fave hands down. They come up through the snow. What better symbol of re-birth could you ever find than those big blue trumpets blooming against the snow!
There are stories about Queen Julianna scandalizing FDR, but I'll leave that for another day. I had a couple of school teachers in here the other day, and they were adamant that I MUST teach their history classes. They like my style I guess! I am not a teacher...I tend to teach way off the curriculum! Getting side tracked by stories of Caligula's horsemanship and the use of barley from the bottom of the beer barrels to make a nutritious and tasty morning porridge. How only goatskin is suitable for hawks hoods and drum heads, and that when the king met with Wat the Tyler in that South Kensington meadow, he wore armour hidden under his robes. Somewhere along the line, the boring stuff they are supposed to learn gets dumped!
I hope to be telling some stories in the days ahead.
Thanks for stopping by.
Are you going to the MD Renn Fest this year?
DJ
By the way, I love tulips--they are on the list of favorite flowers.
DJ
Tulips are my favorite flower and I really enjoyed the picture and the story. You kind of amaze me.
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