Tulip Love

As it was just Mother's Day it is quite appropriate and fortuitous that this post is a dedication to my mom.  There are many things that my momma taught me to love, not the least of which is a love of flowers.  I can definitely remember planting and watching flowers grow pretty much my entire life.  I remember most vividly the roses and the hollyhocks.  These were the prettiest and best of all the flowers we grew I thought.  I adore rose bushes and never minded dead-heading them or taking off all the aphids.  They're just so gorgeous!  The colors that flowers can achieve is ridiculous.  You can't even come close to capturing it on camera, which is unfortunate but even more awesome because you have to get out in them to really appreciate them.
Here's the thing though, we never had tulips.  I remember planting them once and then watching these d*** (but cute) rabbits come up and eat the entire flower in one bite.  So disappointing.  I don't know if that is the reason I never really cared for tulips or what, but basically I thought they were boring.  Just not a very interesting shape I guess.  I always could draw them pretty well though hahah......

And then I went to Chicago and realized that tulips could be fantastically colorful, but still I was not overly impressed with them.  I was more impressed with the fact that Chicago had them ALL over their city.  They really were working on the beautification and it was awesome.  Brilliantly colored flowers with fog was just awesome.  This resulted in a lot of pictures but not a love of tulips.  And then my friends, I went to Holland.  Michigan that is.  Which is apparently the tulip capital of America or something insane like this.  I was in Holland for their annual tulip festival and spent only about 3 hours there, and yet I came away with about 75 pictures of tulips.  The colors were the most amazing things I had ever seen, I wish I could describe.  I had no idea there were so many different kinds and shapes and color combinations of tulips!!  Gorgeous.  Pure Gorgeous.

So in honor of my mother and in honor of a new favorite flower here are some inadequate but still amazing pics of the tulip.