Image: Blefourie via Instagram / A spectator smiles from the fields of the Tulip Festival. The panoramic beauty of innumerable tulips resplendent in a sea of dazzling colours will soon beckon visitors to the inaugural Harrison Tulip Festival in Agassiz this spring. Organizers say the festival will run for approximately four weeks, creating multiple opportunities for visitors to secure spring photos, memories and experiences as they tread softly around tulips. The festival is set to open in late March or early April. 

By Mike Vanden Bosch

Harrison Tulip Festival

First-ever Harrison Tulip Festival set to bloom this spring in Agassiz

Mar 7, 2024 | 7:05 AM

AGASSIZ — The panoramic beauty of innumerable tulips resplendent in a sea of dazzling colours will soon beckon visitors at the inaugural Harrison Tulip Festival in Agassiz this spring.

The B.C. farming family that pioneered the province’s most beloved flower festivals says it will launch the new Harrison Tulip Festival just as soon as Mother Nature and the spring weather cycle permit, contingent upon the bloom cycle.

Organizers say the festival will run for approximately four weeks, creating multiple opportunities for visitors to secure spring photos, memories and experiences as they tread softly around tulips.

According to a news release from the festival, “Flower Festival Queen” Kate Onos-Gilbert and her family pioneered floral agri-tourism in the Fraser Valley in 2006 when they launched Tulips of the Valley on Seabird Island just east of Agassiz. After 10 highly successful years there, they shifted the festival to Chilliwack, on leased land, where the Chilliwack Tulip Festival first bloomed in 2017 and the Chilliwack Sunflower Festival in 2018. Since then, the family has acquired its own farmland in Agassiz in the Harrison River Valley, “returning to our roots where the flower magic first bloomed,” says Onos-Gilbert. Flower aficionados and connoisseurs alike flocked to the stunning new location last summer for the Harrison Sunflower Festival.

As the festival points out, the first-ever Harrison Tulip Festival is also a homecoming for the event and the 18th annual tulip festival organized by the Onos family. The most colourful spring celebration in the province features 35 acres to explore with 10 million tulip, double daffodil and hyacinth bulbs planted, including more than 50 tulip varieties, 15 double daffodil varieties, and a dozen varieties of hyacinths. A spectacular two-acre show garden encompasses mature fruit and nut trees, flowering shrubs and grassy pathways illuminated by thousands of tulips, hyacinths, and fritillaria, a new bloom that promises to be the debuting belle of this year’s festival. The unmistakable splendor of Mount Cheam accentuates the festival’s stunning backdrop.

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Visitors are free to create family or group portraits that include backdrops like swing sets, antique tractors and horse carts, vintage bicycles, a 1950s convertible, a 1965 Airstream trailer, or raised platforms that make staging photos easy.

Two food trucks will be onsite daily, offering food for purchase, including authentic Dutch stroopwafels that cleverly evoke tulips’ storied homeland. A farm store also offers souvenirs, fresh cut and potted flowers, and refreshments for purchase.

Onos Greenhouses, the family’s sister company, currently supplies 85 per cent of the cut tulips that are sold throughout Western Canada. Look for fresh cut Onos tulips and hyacinths in a store near you.

The Harrison Tulip Festival is located at 5039 Lougheed Highway in Agassiz.

Visit harrisontulipfest.com for more information.