Victoria’s Flower Count is a fun promotion sponsored by the Greater Victoria and Saanich Peninsula chambers of commerce, Butchart Gardens and Tourism Victoria. The flower count takes place during the first week of March each year. While most of Canada is still firmly frozen, we like to let people know that in Victoria BC, spring has sprung! Does that make you consider uprooting your family and moving to Victoria?
This event stems from a late 1960’s promotion called Victorian Days, where members of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce would visit cities like Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton, dressed in Victorian era costumes, and hand out daffodils to let everyone know that our winter was over. In 1976 the idea of counting our flowers germinated and grew!
People who are living in Victoria have cultivated this promotion; it has grown into a community competition where each municipality tries to out-count the other to be named the “Bloomingest Community” in Greater Victoria. From Sooke to the Saanich Peninsula and every garden in between, people send in their flower counts for their municipality and to be grafted to the aggregate Victoria Flower Count.
During the chilly spring of 2011, the total flower count still managed to reach 260,457,579 blossoms! The City of Victoria topped the list of communities with 138,920,564.
The winter of 2011/2012 has been very mild, so it should be interesting to see what kind of flower count we will have. If you are living in Victoria and want to participate, you can submit your count at the official website for the Victoria Flower Count.