When I go to a tulip festival I expect to see tulips.

After all, there are literally millions of bulbs planted in Ottawa as the basis for the Canadian Tulip Festival, here as a reminder of the enduring friendship between Canada and The Netherlands.

So I’m not sure how or why one flowerbed this year was a mixture of daffodils and dandelions. It didn’t look all that bad, though admittedly a little out of place.

I did have to wonder though. There are dozens of gardeners and horticulturalists who work every year to make sure the tulips are in top shape for the thousands of tourists who flock to Ottawa each year to see the blooms. How could they miss this?

After all, as nice as they can be to look at, dandelions are considered a weed. Most people try to get rid of them.

Maybe gardening concepts have changed and no-one thought to tell me. The alternative is that the horticulturalists made a mistake with the biggest flower show of the year. That couldn’t happen, could it?