by Paige Farrell

Pella’s favorite flowers will soon be at their peak and a little ahead of schedule, so Pella Historical Museums is trying to embrace the early start to spring.
Executive Director Jessi Galligan says they’ve been working on a few projects to try and give people something to do while the flowers show their colors in April, one of which embraces a former tradition in the town as it relates to wooden tulips.

“You may have seen this on social media. We’ve launched a project to get wooden tulips into the hands of community members, which they will then paint and decorate and return to us and then we will go around right before tulip time to beds that might need a little bit of extra color or brightening up and put those tulips in those beds so that visitors to the community still are seeing bright, colorful tulips when they come visit during tulip time. So for people to be able to do that, they can come to the historical museum gift shop, pick up their tulips, we are asking for a small donation to help cover the cost of that, about two dollars a tulip, or more if you want to help us see this festival continue for years and decades to come it’s always very appreciated. You can take home your tulips, grab an instruction sheet so that you know what you’re doing and then return them to us by the end of April.”

Additionally, Pella Historical Museums is working to organize special downtown tours in conjunction with the early crowds expected ahead of the Tulip Festival itself in late April.

“Yeah, we’re very much looking forward to offering some city tours throughout April as well. This is normally something that you see at tulip time. The rotary wagons people will be familiar with pulled by tractors around town and were excited to bring these out in April, like I said with expected big crowds in April coming to see the tulips we’ll be hosting these historic tours on April 20, April 26, and April 27, so you can expect between the hours of 10:00 and 3:00 to hop on a city tour wagon, and you can find all those details on out website as well. This will be a great thing for residents who are just wanting to learn a little bit more about Pella, who maybe haven’t taken this tour before, as well as visitors coming to town.”

Find out more about how Pella Historical Museums is celebrating the upcoming tulip bloom here.