Hot time on the pier for tulips
More than 39,000 colorful tulips greeted onlookers and tourists on Valentine’s Day Saturday, opening the annual Tulipmania flower festival at Pier 39 on San Francisco’s waterfront.
The event, which typically brings a bright bit of springtime in the heart of the city’s winter, this year opened to unseasonably warm weather and clear blue skies.
The flower show, which has been put on by Pier 39 for many years, runs through Feb. 22 and is meant to brighten the tourist hot spot by covering the area in colorful flowers. To that end, the tulips are planted in barrels up and down the pier’s shopping areas, as well as in the small planters and flower beds at West Park.
The sea of red, purple, white and yellow tulips was sprinkled with the flash of other flowers, as well as barrels planted with a variety of vegetables, including kale and lettuce.
On Saturday morning, onlookers snapped photos and stopped to marvel at the tulips. This year, Pier 39 is encouraging visitors to take pictures of the tulips and post them on Instagram with the hashtag #tulipmania for the chance to win a canvas print.
“It adds a lot to the area, and it looks beautiful,” said Amanda Purssey, 55, a marketing man- ager visiting on business from London. “You only see these in the spring, so it’s shocking to me. Now, spring has arrived on Valentine’s Day.”
The Tulipmania festival takes months of preparation, gardeners said. In June, tulip bulbs are purchased, mostly from Holland and Washington. Then, at Halloween, gardeners prep the soil and plant the tulips through Christmas. By midMarch, the gardeners will clean the tulip bulbs from the barrels and begin to prepare for next year.
“It’s a taste of Holland and Washington,” said Givonne Law, a 25-yearold landscaper who has worked at Pier 39 for a year and a half. “People can’t really see this many tulips in any other place in California.”
The tulips are generally in bloom for about six weeks, beginning in January. Gardeners plant early, mid-season and late tulips to fill up the area for more than a month. Due to the dry weather, the first set of tulips popped up in mid-January this year, two weeks earlier than normal.
While the landscapers carefully plan the barrels to match colors — yellow with white, yellow with red, purple with white — sometimes stray tulips end up in the wrong place, like the yellow tulip that ended up in the purple and white barrel.
Tulips are well-suited to San Francisco’s cool and sunny climate, Law said, making the city a logical place to put on such an event.
Law, who leads tour groups every morning during the event, said this year was a bit tricky due to dramatic shifts in weather — from pouring rain in December and dry weather in January to rain in early February and warm temperatures this past week.
Still, as evidenced by the vibrant tulips and delighted observers, things turned out fine.
“They’re still putting on a great show,” she said.
Husband and wife Alexis Sohrakoff, 29, and Hersh Reddy, 39, of San Francisco were part of the group Law guided.
“We wanted something we could do together that wasn’t cliche,” she said of their Valentine’s morning plans.
“We like flowers,” Reddy said, in between breaks of snapping photos of the tulips.
Mirani Lee, who lives on the Peninsula, was shocked the flowers made it through the tumultuous weather.
“I can’t believe they can still survive these storms for the past couple of months with high wind and rain,” she said. But Lee was happy with the way things turned out.
“For me, I’ve never seen this grow in the Bay Area, and it’s the first time I’ve seen them in San Francisco. It looks like Holland in the pictures,” she said.
While San Francisco’s tulip exhibit is impressive, it pales in comparison to what happens in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, National Tulip Day — set for January 17 — marks the beginning of the tulip season every year. Thousands of tulips fill Amsterdam’s Dam Square during that time.
Tulipmania offers daily tours beginning at 10 a.m. each day at Pier 39’s entrance plaza.
Elsewhere in the city, the Chinese New Year Flower Fair began Saturday and continues Sunday on Grant Avenue and Pacific Street in Chinatown. The event allows families to purchase flowers and plants in anticipation of the Chinese New Year, which is next Thurs- day. In the past, more than 300,000 people have attended the fair.
A stage with Chinese dance and music will also be there, along with a petting zoo and a photo area for children. The event runs from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Sunday.
The weather outlook for this weekend and the next several days could bring larger-than-normal crowds in both areas.
In San Francisco, warm weather is expected to continue into early in the week, said Steve Anderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Monterey. On Sunday, the temperature is expected to reach 70 degrees, with highs of 68 on Monday and 66 on Tuesday.
The dry weather will continue through the end of the week, with cooler temperatures beginning on Wednesday. Rain is not on the horizon, according to Anderson.
“It’s fairly unusual,” Anderson said. “I think we broke a couple records (Friday). It’s certainly unusual — one to be so warm in February and two to be so dry.”