Ottawa (AFP) – People wander through fields of colorful tulips at Commissioners Park in Ottawa as the annual Canadian Tulip Festival gets underway. The festival started in 1953 as a nod to the Dutch royal family, which had sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa in gratitude for Canadians having sheltered Princess Juliana and her daughters during the Second World War Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Over the past seven decades, it grew into a major tourist event.
