Mount Vernon's Tulip Town a flowerbed for peace

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It boasts flowers with names such as Princess Diana and Pink Glory, but Tulip Town isn't just another pretty field: This Mount Vernon farm, a true labor of love, has the newest International Peace Garden.

MOUNT VERNON — There was a low-key ceremony here on Saturday morning — involving tulips as a peace symbol — that will place a family business called Tulip Town in a rather exclusive club.
Joining Rome, Berlin, Hiroshima and 13 other famous places that have an International Peace Garden was not a major city, but a farm.
"Isn't it an awesome sight?" said Tom DeGoede, who owns Tulip Town with his wife of 48 years, Jeannette.
He was looking at the fluttering flags from each of the 16 countries with peace gardens, long rows of tulips blooming in the background. The couple has spent $30,000 and long hours on the project, and doesn't regret any of the money or effort.
To Jeannette, there is no better flower to promote peace.
"When you turn on the TV, all you see is brutal killing," she said. "It seems like if we can bring something of beauty to people, that's what we should do.
"It's the only flower that I know of that goes in the color spectrum from black to white. And it's multicolored and multipetaled! Plus, the varieties are endless. It's absolutely a perfect flower for peace."
Tulip Town on Bradshaw Road might be familiar to Northwesterners who make the annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival trek in April — the season starts today — but it hardly has the name familiarity of Athens or Budapest, also home to tulip peace gardens.
One could say the Tulip Town peace garden evolved because, for the past decade, every weekday from noon to 1 p.m., the couple is definitively NOT available for business calls — or any calls — no matter how busy it might be in a business in which 2 million bulbs are planted annually.
At noon, Jeannette said, "we go out, maybe to a nice little restaurant down the road. That's our date." Over lunch and a glass of cabernet, "we talk."

Jeanette is 67; Tom is 73.
In 1958, she was selling popcorn at the Lido movie theater in Mount Vernon and attending community college. She liked the looks of the young Tom, who had emigrated three years earlier from Holland, among the families from that country that started tulip businesses in Skagit Valley.


The two met again at a church function; he asked her to the movies. A year later, they were married, and would have five children.
In recent times, they talked about the idea that Jeannette had after attending a tulip-growers convention in 1999 in Ottawa. That's where she learned about the International Peace Garden. The idea stayed with her.
The gardens began in Ottawa, which during World War II gave refuge from the Nazis to Dutch Princess Juliana and her two young daughters. In 1943, when the princess gave birth to a third daughter, the Canadians temporarily ceded the hospital room to The Netherlands, so the baby girl would be born a Dutch citizen.
After the war, the Dutch royal family sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa as a token of thanks; Princess Juliana sent another 20,000 bulbs.
Since then, tulip peace gardens have been dedicated in such places as Pretoria, South Africa, to commemorate the end of apartheid; in Hiroshima, Japan, to raise awareness about disarmament; and in Washington, D. C., to honor the U.S.-Canadian border, the world's longest undefended border.
But back to those lunches, where Jeannette and Tom made sketches on paper. Their peace garden ended up as two sections, each with 14-foot-wide, 8-foot-high linking yellow plastic arches. It would feature numerous kinds of tulips blooming at different times — tulips with names such as Pride of Washington, Princess Diana and Pink Glory.
Then the peace-garden organization, based in Batavia, N.Y., approved the DeGoedes' idea.
Tom said he's not a political person. He said the peace garden simply sounded like a good idea.
"In my mind, things don't have to be complicated. I get an idea, we work on it and then we have it," he said.
Jeannette remembered being at that tulip convention in Ottawa.
"We had people from Japan, France, Canada, Turkey, the U.S. We sat around and had interpreters," she said. "We figured things out. It appeared to me that if the average person could figure out solutions to problems, why can't the leadership?"

By Erik Lacitis

                                                

Seattle Times staff reporter