HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — Flint residents Mike and Amanda Running have driven to Holland for three consecutive years for the love of tulips. They’ve never attended the annual Tulip Time Festival.
“We’ve never been here to see the tulips,” Amanda Running said, grinning. “We always come when they’re dead.”
Her comment caused everone listening to burst into laughter. The Runnings were two among hundreds of people who showed up at three of Holland’s parks to dig up the tulip bulbs, paying $10 per 5-gallon bucket for the chance to plant their own tulip gardens at home. (See our photo gallery.)
Mayor Nancy DeBoer said it was an amazing turnout, based on the colored plastic ties used to mark paid-for buckets. Last year, the city had ordered 600; this year, 800.
She called the dig “super fun” recounting seeing a group digging bulbs, discussing where the bride-to-be among them could plant them around her future home.
Gin Greenlee and her husband, whom she described as “an organic gardener of 40 years,” had carefully planned their bulb-gathering trip, she said, based on what they saw while the tulips were in full bloom. Her mom, California resident Tina Guizar, 92, watched them work from the family’s car.
Experienced bulb diggers brought large shovels or the many-tined potato fork or manure fork, the better to open up the garden beds and liberate the spent bulbs.
Most people could fill a bucket with bulbs in less than 30 minutes. Working in teams, they could do the job faster.
The annual tulip dig runs from 9 to 11:30 a.m., with no digging allowed until a signal sounds at 9 a.m. on the dot. This year at Window on the Waterfront, the noise came from a utility vehicle horn and Holland attorney Nathan Bock, who’d been volunteering at the table where people paid for their buckets and picked up maps of the gardens.
One of the most-popular plots this year had to be El Nino, a tall speciman with petal colors ranging from a warm amber to fiery orange. But every plot got plenty of diggers, with one group at times helping another, either discussing how deep to dig to get to the bulbs (just a few inches, in most cases) or discussing the best way to pack the bulbs into buckets, or simply strategizing their respective digs.
Holland resident Shafer Graham came out ot help his girlfrined’s family.
“She kind of put together a perfect plan,” he said, estimating they’d end up with 50 to 75 bulbs per bucket. “We’ve all got our marching orders.”
The bulbs, he said, would be divided among properties owned by his girlfriend’s family.
The annual tulip dig serves multiple purposes, raising money for Holland beautification, while emptying tulip beds at Window on the Waterfront, Centennial Park, and Windmill Island Gardens’ fields, so Holland’s park workers can fill them with summer plants and flowers; helping people beautify their own property with tulip beds in a relatively inexpensive way — diggers bring their own buckets and digging tools — and funding other city projects, such as a living floral mosaic, bronze sculptures, and a yellow brick road currently being installed at Centennial Park and Herrick District Library.
