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Feature: Tulip fields in Canada's western province attract lots of photo lovers

Xinhua, April 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

If there's a place in Canada that you could call the perfect place for a photo-op, it might be in Fraser Valley, where over 30 acres of tulips in dozens of varieties make the perfect backdrop for the ideal selfie or the perfect portrait.

Since 2006, the two-week-long Tulips of the Valley Festival in the province of British Columbia, about 100 km east of Vancouver, has become an annual family-run spectacle in the valley. Since then, it has been growing in popularity every year after a local family first opened their commercial tulip fields to the public.

Now the fields cover a plot of about 35 acres, and includes roughly 25 varieties of tulips, and millions of tulip bulbs.

Kate Onos-Gilbert, the festival coordinator and daughter of the owner of the farmland, said the festival was first started with her dad.

"We've fields here, working fields for a long period of time and then my dad decided it was time for people to see it as well, so instead of just using it as working fields to get the bulbs, we wanted some people to enjoy the color that we have," she told Xinhua at the side of the colorful fields.

Onos-Gilbert said interest in the tulip fields has been surging each year. Only about 200 people came to see the tulips the first year, but last year more than 20,000 visitors turned up, and even more have been coming out this year armed with their cameras and their best poses.

"These last two years it' s really gotten significantly bigger, so this year we' re probably at least 30 percent higher than last year. We' re meeting the kind of the peak that we can get. We can' t get much bigger than this," she added.

Amateur photographer Dennis Yang has been here for several years. He said it provided a wonderful space to get fresh air with friends and offers plenty of photo opportunities of the flowers and nearby mountains.

"It' s so amazing. It' s so colorful here, you know. It' s very, very nice," he said with a broad smile.

The bulbs are planted in September over seven days using three tractors. The bulbs lay dormant over the winter, laying deep roots before poking above ground in February, and then blooming in April. Endit