Behind the Sign

April 1 in the Year of Our Lord 2025 marks the 42nd annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival — the spring celebration of the agricultural product among so many that single-bloomingly put a pin in the Magic Skagit on the world map of seasonal celebrations — one that if not as well known as the Cherry Blossom Festival in our nation’s capitol attracts no less passionate a throng of admirers, domestic and international. How big a throng, you might ask? Last year the Magic Skagit’s tulip fields attracted 600,000 tourists who contributed an estimated $83 million in revenue in 2024. This is our Meyer Sign tribute to the Magic Skagit's iconic bloom.

Every time I gaze upon a tulip, not to mention entire fields of them stretching to a horizon framed by the purple mountains majesty of the Cascades, it kind of takes my breath away. Having confessed this, you can appreciate why I look forward to the prospect of continuing to view tulips even as we approach Mother’s Day, 2023 — hopefully, with less tulip traffic, but at least with warmer temperatures than when the annual Tulip Festival began in what turned out to be the fourth month of winter in the Magic Skagit. To celebrate the floral event that makes the Skagit Valley an international destination venue each spring, I thought I’d go back to some tulip themed “Tales of the Magic Skagit” episodes from the past — a literary tip-toe through the tulips, if you will.

If you think we’re obsessed with tulips here in the Magic Skagit, a place where one month of every year is dedicated to a carnival of blooms, we’ve got nothing on Holland in the years between 1634 and 1637, when “tulipomania” reigned.

Welcome to Phase III. Consider this essay a verbal bouquet of daffodils and tulips...and hang in there, Magic Skagit. You've got this.

You may be amazed to learn, as I did (thanks to the Skagit County Historical Museum), that the person who is generally credited with being the first to establish our local tulip industry was not a Dutch transplant, but a hearty local varietal who is fondly remembered as Mrs. Mary Stewart of Samish Island. As yet another Tulip Festival draws near, this seems like a good time to tell her story.