Albany's signature spring event is returning for its 76th year in May. But after a mild winter, will the tulips bloom on time?
Jena DiTonno is the City Gardener for Albany, overseer of the tulip patches. She and her staff have planted a quarter of a million spring bulbs.
"We've lucked out this year, we have beautiful green lawns. And everything has really kind of lined up perfectly this year. There's about 135 different varieties this year of tulips, they all have different bloom times. They're all kind of broken up into groups, and then we use the groups to have like a roundabout estimate of bloom time. Some will be super early in the spring, some will be later some are mid. So we kind of can control that. I mean, nature is nature, it's going to do what it wants. But as far as knowing that a garden is full sun and there's no shade, I can try to control it by putting early or later blooms into a sunny garden instead of the earlier ones. Or the reverse if it's a very shady part of the park. I know that I can put early ones in there and the last most of the spring," said DiTonno.
DiTonno expects the first blooms with the next burst of warm weather, and she says everything appears to be "right on schedule."
"I've been working in the gardens for 16 years, and we kind of do have, it's almost like a cycle, you'll get the years where you have hardly any snow. Nothing going on, as far as that real winter weather. This one was very mild. I wasn't expecting it to be this mild. But as far as planning, I always kind of just gauge it on when Mother's Day falls in the month. Right now it's a later, kind of a later season for us. The last couple have been on the later side of May. And we really like it when it's in that first week of May. So as far as gauging which tulips I'm maybe getting more of, that's all on counting on the calendar," DiTonno said.
Despite some late season snow, winter in New York was warmer and milder than usual, due to El Niño.
DiTonno is confident tulips will be in bloom at the festival.
"Will all of the tulips be there for Tulip Fest? No, that's just the nature of the flowers. Some will be here early. I also do tulip tours, the two weeks leading up to tulip fest. So the earlier ones are really good to have for the tulip tours. And anybody that just wants to visit the park before the festival. And if anyone's not into crowds, I always suggest that you go at least the week before the festival and you'll really catch the, the peak of most of the tulips all being open together. But I do make sure that I have a nice good mix of all the different blooms as far as times, colors, heights, shapes. All of that. I have little charts that I break down and and I add everything into categories. There's a lot of Excel spreadsheets that happen behind the scenes," said DiTonno.
The traditional Dutch ceremony of scrubbing the streets clean the day before big celebration has served as the official kickoff to Tulip Festival weekend since its inception 76 years ago. The region's rite of spring is May 11th and 12th, in Washington Park.
