SLO Arts Council | Spring Brings Flowery Celebrations

SLO ARTS

Spring Brings Flowery Celebrations

BY MISSY REITNER-CAMERON, SLO COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL BOARD MEMBER

The Canadian Tulip Festival, held in Ottawa, is one of many flowery celebrations around the world. Contributed photos

Spring has sprung here on the beautiful Central Coast with vivid green hills, fields of yellow mustard and pops of purple lupin. When wandering around our amazing neighborhoods and parks, I often think about how others celebrate spring and how these celebrations might inspire or influence my work and the work of others. Here’s a few intriguing traditions starting with one close to home:

Wildflower Viewing, Central California hues of the spring season.

Cherry Blossom Festival, Jinhae, South Korea

While Japan usually gets the cherry blossom traffic, the Cherry Blossom Festival in Jinhae, with the smells and sights of over 1000 trees in bloom, makes travelers feel as if they are on another planet! With week-long celebrations consisting of light shows, parades and of course delicious food, you can’t go wrong here.

The Carrizo Plains Monument, aka our backyard, is one of the best places to see this phenomenon. In a good bloom year, wildflowers in multiple colors carpet landscapes across the state and it’s one of the most beautiful spring events around the world.

Holi, Rajasthan, India Songkran, Thailand

Songkran - known as the Water Splashing Festival — is a celebration to mark the start of the Buddhist New Year. It includes many different types of ceremonies but the wettest and wildest is a huge water fight including buckets, water cannons and more.

Rajasthan is a beautiful place with vibrant colors on a normal day but during Holi, color gets kicked up about 20 notches. Each spring, people in India celebrate Holi, the Festival of Colors. This may very well be the most wellknown spring celebration around the world and is celebrated by Hindus across Northern India. It involves throwing colored powder at one another, which pays tribute to the many Tulip Festival, Ottawa, Canada

Noted as the largest Tulip Festival in the world. This 10-day festival is a result of the over 100,000 bulbs that were gifted to Ottawa in 1945 by the Dutch royal family. That gift is known as the ‘Tulip Legacy’ and those tulips have now increased to more than 1 million. The Canadian Tulip Festival has been celebrating this spring flower, an international symbol of friendship and peace, since 1953.

Versailles Fountain Show, Versailles, France

Who knew that fountains need a season off? During the winter, Versailles’ fountains do not run and many of the grounds are closed to the public. April 1 is when all the groves open and the beautiful fountains of Versailles wake from their slumbers, marking the start of spring spectacular.

Seeing a thread? Water, flowers, color. Spring in three words. A fun family-friendly spring project is flower pressing. You can keep the beauty of spring around all year! Listen to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” focusing specifically on SPRING while searching for flowers.

Flower Pressing:

Find a spot where you have permission to pick flowers and carefully pick a section from a plant. Try not to damage other flowers or take too many.

Open a heavy book and line it with newspaper. Place the flowers you want to press on newspaper between the pages of the book.

Carefully close the book and weigh it down — additional heavy books work well as weights.

Store this pile in a warm, dry place and check on your flower specimens daily.

Once your flowers are dry, carefully remove them.

Now you have beautiful flowers to glue to cards, make bookmarks with or to use in a decoupage project.

Remember not all plants are easy to press. Some take a long time to lose moisture and tend to go moldy so check them daily. Bulkier plants are also more difficult to press well, so start small.

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