Travel Tips

Off-Season Travel: Spring Flower Festivals in Nantucket and Beyond

Locations in this article:  Paris, France Providence, RI

Milestone Road Daffodils, Nantucket - photo by Cary HazlegroveWhen winter finally gives way to spring of the East Coast, Nantucket emerges from its gray, windy days and nights, culminating with the bright and bountiful Daffodil Festival. Jamie Stringfellow reports on that fleeting period between the quiet gray of a six-month winter and the busy summer of a resort island.

After the cranberries of fall, and the brief respite of colorful Christmas lights, Nantucket turns finally to deep winter gray.

On the little island 30 miles out to sea, off Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, the quiet season is welcome.

Islanders reclaim their streets and get their beaches back, and life slows to a quieter cadence.

Here, weather dominates all; it’s an entity in itself. If it’s too windy (and it’s windy all the time on Nantucket in winter) ferries don’t run, planes don’t fly, and people get stuck on (or worse, off) the island.

Learn more about Nantucket’s Christmas celebration with Travelers’ Favorite Holiday Experiences: Winter Wonderlands Around the World.

The weather is a bonding thing: With a three-day nor’easter coming, it’s fun to see everyone you know at the Stop and Shop, “grabbing,” as one local says, “for that last head of broccoli.”

Grey Sky & Daffodils - photo by Cary HazlegroveThen there’s the gray: the steel gray of the cold Atlantic, the powdered gray of a storm-laden sky, gray fog, gray cobblestones that at least mercifully glow in the headlights of cars in the late afternoon dark (sun sets at 4:12 p.m. at the winter solstice).

Even the houses are gray—most of them shingled, the shingles weathered to a faded black or, just … gray.

“That’s why it is not a misnomer, ‘the little gray lady,’” said Nantucket teacher and gardener Connie Umberger about Nantucket’s nickname, in Cary Hazlegrove’s iconic book Nantucket. The book, the 13th by the island photographer whose name is synonymous with the beauty of Nantucket, celebrates the island’s seasons.

For more information on local travel, visit our Northeast US Travel section.

Old Bike & Daffodils, Nantucket - photo by Cary HazlegroveThough Hazlegrove says her favorite season is winter with its subtle grays, when green finally starts to show, it is “such a huge, hopeful sign.”

Understanding the nourishment such color provided to a color-starved island, seasonal resident Jean McCausland, a former publisher of Gourmet magazine, convinced the Nantucket Garden Club to sponsor a daffodil show back in 1974.

Bulbs were planted along Milestone road, and soon, thousands were added each year to the fields, and roadsides, with McCausland once even ordering 8 tons of bulbs directly from the Netherlands, and enlisting the help of local landscapers and school children to plant them.

Daffodils - photo by Cary Hazlegrove“It’s hard to envision what Nantucket would look like without all those daffodils,” said Hazlegrove. “They are harbingers of spring—along with the red-winged blackbirds, goldfinches and pink cherry trees. The drive down Milestone road is just amazing.”

The Garden Club’s daffodil show soon enough became the Nantucket Daffodil Festival (now sponsored by the island’s Chamber of Commerce), held this year from April 23-25.

Three million daffodils now line roads and gardens and adorn shop windows all over town. It’s become a time for all of Nantucket to turn out, literally. Summer residents come back to open up homes and celebrate with their local neighbors.

Want to travel in the spring for less? Try Not Paris in the Spring: Whether Your Travel Dollar Stretches Further.

Daffodil Peace Sign on a Volkswagon Beetle - photo by Cary HazlegroveThe festival’s grand event is the Annual Antique Car Parade, held on Saturday, with more than 100 flower-bedecked vintage cars motoring slowly through the cobblestone streets of Nantucket town, out to the seaside village of Siasconset (‘Sconset to locals).

There the cars pull up on newly green lawns and open their tailgates and trunks, and residents and visitors plunk down for the Daffodil Tailgate Picnic. The fare ranges from gourmet on bone china to burgers in boxes.

Locals Wearing Daffy Hats - photo by Cary Hazlegrove“It’s really fun,” says Hazlegrove. “People wear their ‘daffy hats’ and there’s a hat pageant.” There’s also a children’s parade, a Daffodil Dog Parade, and the Garden Club’s annual show.

Though locals joke that there really isn’t much spring on Nantucket (Selectman Michael Kopko says in Hazlegrove’s book, “Spring does occur—I believe it’s some time between April 28 and April 29”), 3 million daffodils announce the advent of that time. Call it spring, or “post-winter,” or “not-quite-summer.”

In one of those sweet graces the natural world often provides, the “hopeful” yellow beauties, it turns out, are for islanders only: The daffodils are gone by the third week of May, just before the summer season (and onslaught of crowds of visitors) officially arrives on Memorial Day.

Find more great experiences in our Culture & Festivals section.

Woman wearing wreath on Daffodil Day - photo by Cary HazlegroveVisit www.nantucketchamber.org for more info; Nantucket is accessible by airplane or ferry. Visitors are encouraged to leave cars behind, as all activities are accessible by bike, walking or taxi.

Nantucket’s not the only windy gray place to banish winter with a floral celebration. Almost as long-running is coastal Meriden, Connecticut’s Daffodil Festival, which, like the celebration on the gray lady, began very much as a community event, and has become one of the state’s premier celebrations. Though Meriden doesn’t come close to Nantucket’s 3 million blooms, they’ve got “600,001 daffodils” mostly all in one place—a sea of 61 varieties (in more than just yellow) in 1,800-acre Hubbard Park. The April 24-25 celebration includes music, fireworks and, of course, a lot of daffodils.

Nantucket is full of surprises: Unexpected Summer Wine Festivals.

Lilac FlowersRochester, New York can boast of some of the country’s harshest winters, with wind and snow blowing off Lake Erie, for six months straight (or more). The city has the dubious distinction of being one of the five finalists each year for the state’s “Golden Snowball Award” for most snowfall. (With a total of 89.6 inches, they came in second this year to Syracuse).

All of this must have inspired horticulturist John Dunbar to start planting lilacs back in 1892 to provide a big purple proclamation that winter was finally finished. The highlight of the 10-day Lilac Festival (May 14-23 this year) is Dunbar’s collection in Highland Park, which has grown to over 500 varieties of lilacs on 1,200 bushes, making it the world’s largest collection.

Find more lilacs on Mackinac Island in northern Michigan, another island friendly to foot travel (no cars allowed). Islanders say their lilacs are unusually large, and best viewed during their June 11-20 festival.

The rainy Pacific Northwest has its silver—or perhaps, pink, yellow, orange and red— linings. Check out the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in Washington which runs for the entire month of April. We’re talking miles and miles of tulips, in every direction.

By Jamie Stringfellow for PeterGreenberg.com. Photos by Cary Hazlegrove. Jamie is co-founder of WeekendWalk.com, launching this week. Check out the site for walking destinations around the world (without roughing it), including an upcoming weekend walk in Nantucket this May.

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