Every year Ottawa receives 20,000 tulip bulbs from the Netherlands Royal Family and the Dutch Bulb Growers, a thank you for sheltering the Royal Family and for Canada's help with liberation of the Netherlands during WWII.
Here's a little more:
In 1943 Princess Margriet Francisca, the younger sister of the current Queen of the Netherlands, was born at Ottawa Civic Hospital - the only royal ever to be born in North America. The Dutch Royal Family had fled to Canada in 1940 after the WWII invasion of their country. Among their problems - the expected royal child needed to be delivered on Dutch territory to be a Dutch citizen. So, Canada ceded this one hospital maternity room temporarily to the Netherlands. In appreciation, in the fall of 1945, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs.
Now you know how the world's largest tulip festival in Ottawa came to be.
