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In Saranac Lake, painting the town yellow

by on May 3rd, 2010

On Friday, Saranac Lake’s new village mayor Clyde Rabideau unveiled a plan to plant 1,000,000 daffodil bulbs this fall — an ambitious effort that will produce “Daffest” next spring.

I tried to do the math on how many square feet of garden space will be needed for all those daffodils.  Suffice to say it’s a lot.

At Friday’s boisterous, gleeful press conference — who knew gardeners could stir it up like that? — people imagined Saranac Lake glowing yellow from space, or lighting up Google Earth.

My postage stamp lawn in the village won’t harbor more than a tiny fraction of all that bulbness, but count me in.  For more information, go here.

2 Comments on “In Saranac Lake, painting the town yellow”

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  1. newt says:
    May 3, 2010 at 9:15 am

    For comparison, consider the Ottawa, Ontario, Tulip Fesitval, (which starts this Friday, BTW). The roots of the festival (sorry) originated after WWII when the Queen of the Netherlands gave the city 100,000 bulbs in thanks for it’s taking in the Dutch royal family during the war. The sight of all these plants in bloom, starting in the ’50’s, had a big impact in making the capitol of Canada even more of a tourist destination than it already was. Now, the Tulip Festival boasts over 7 million plants, according to the Fesitval website .
    But, that’s Ottawa. A million daffodils in a village the size of Saranac Lake?

  2. Mayflower says:
    May 3, 2010 at 11:06 am

    When I was a child, my hometown launched a 5-year project to turn the city into a “redbud mecca.” Each year, every 1st grader was sent home from school with a redbud sapling, obviously small enough for small children to carry in one hand! I remember rushing home to dig a hole for my little bare stick. I watched it grow, taller than our garage before I graduated from high school. And, because redbud re-seeds, the trees took over the project in subsequent years. Now, in early spring, every neighborhood throughout the city is a mass of gorgeous purple blossoms.

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