8 Flower Festivals Your Family Won’t Want to Miss

From Texas bluebonnets to California poppies to lilacs in Michigan to azaleas in the Blue Ridge Mountains, America blooms with spring flower festivals. Find one near you to inspire your family’s travels.

For the entire month of April, Washington’s Skagit Valley is brilliant with millions of tulips, and during the month-long Tulip Festival, visitors can view them as they drive past the farms or walk among them in gardens. You can see them at several formal sites, such as Garden Rosalyn, where blooms of different colors are planted in patterns, forming bright mosaics across the landscape. Throughout the valley are RoozenGaarde flower fields, some of which have places where you can park and walk among the tulips.

Holland, Michigan, is also known for its tulips, with millions of blooms throughout the city during Tulip Time, when other festival activities celebrate the town’s Dutch heritage.

Although fields all across the state are bright with orange California poppies, nowhere are the state flowers more plentiful than in Lancaster. April 25–27, Lancaster celebrates their brilliance in the California Poppy Festival, where music, art and local foods can be enjoyed in a setting of bright orange poppies.

That same April weekend brings Thomasville Rose Show and Festival to Thomasville, Georgia. Roses of every color and variety are admired and celebrated in gardens, exhibits and an Annual Standard Flower Show. Orchids get their moment, too, at Orchids on Parade; live music, parades, and family-friendly activities fill the weekend, and local restaurants vie for attention the entire month with treats such as rose-scented gelato and pistachio rose macarons.

Beautiful Highland Park is the scene of the Rochester Lilac Festival, May 9–18. The park is filled with more than 500 different varieties of these fragrant purple and white blooms, which thrive in the upstate New York climate. Live music, Lilac Parade, an art and crafts market, flea market, food vendors, and guided tours of the historic park fill the week with activities.

For two weeks, from late May into early June, roses seem to bloom everywhere in Portland, Oregon. Flower exhibitions are only part of the activities at Portland Rose Festival, which kicks off with a huge Grand Floral Parade, an extravaganza of rose-covered floats. The Annual Spring Rose Show is the nation’s largest and oldest, filled with stunning floral displays.

To put on your calendar for early April next year are the Azalea Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and the annual Bluebonnet Flower Festival in Burnet, Texas.