Annual Events in February
Dine Around Town
Over 50 participating restaurants will offer 3 course menus costing $20, $30, $40 dollars per person. Offering outstanding value to customers will allow our restaurant members to entice locals and visitors alike to Dine Around and dine around often during this 18 day event. Victoria boasts the second highest number of restaurants per capita in North America, and Victoria’s outstanding restaurants are eager to showcase their culinary skills.
Victoria Boat and Fishing Show
Vancouver Island's premiere outdoor sportsman and recreation expo at Pearkes Rec. Centre at Tillicum Mall.
Victoria Flower Count
"The great Victoria Flower Count is going ahead this year, albeit a little later than usual.
Butchart Gardens and the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce have stepped in to make sure the annual nosethumbing at the rest of the country continues, after Tourism Victoria indicated it no longer wanted to go it alone.
Typically held the last week of February, the flower count will be postponed until March this year.
The 32-year-old event sees Victorians submitting flower counts that are tallied and used in a media blitz to promote Victoria to the rest of Canada.
Tourism Victoria CEO Rob Gialloreto said the issue wasn’t the budget of the count, which is $3,500, but the staff time.
“We didn’t hide the fact that we made a firm decision that the way we have been the sole programmer for the flower count wasn’t going to happen again,” Gialloreto said. “It took a lot of hours from our staff time.”
Gialloreto informally floated the idea of a shared partnership soon after the 2008 count. In October, Butchart Gardens expressed interest. This week, the chamber agreed to provide $1,500 and lend administrative support. “It’s a Victoria icon,” said chamber CEO Bruce Carter.
The three will meet Monday to discuss a date for the count. “I don’t know if we’ll miss the daffodils, but I understand from the experts at Butchart Gardens that it should not make that much of a difference,” Gialloreto said."
By Joanne Hatherly / Times Colonist
February 6, 2009
How to count
- Small tree full of blossoms = 250,000 blossoms
- Medium tree full of blossoms = 500,000 blossoms
- Large tree full of blossoms = 750,000
- Small Heather bush = 500 blossoms
- Medium Heather bush = 1,000 blossoms
- Large Heather bush = 2,000 blossoms
Previous Years Counts
2,437,696,512
flowers counted in 2008
3,364,658,680
flowers counted in 2007
5,358,902,569
flowers counted in 2006
4,773,559,314
flowers counted in 2005
1,877,332,190
flowers counted in 2004
3,442,622,305
flowers counted in 2003
8,521,514,876
flowers counted in 2002 (record set)
1,470,224,569
flowers counted in 2001
Flowers in the gardens at Birds of a Feather B&B Victoria - photo & flower credit Annette Moen
Hey, T.O.: We’re calling to do bloomin’ gloating, OK?
Jack Knox | Times Colonist
March 02, 2008
Today is the last day of the Victoria Flower Count — or, as it is less formally known, the 32nd Annual Festival Of Bite Me, Toronto.
Dunno what the total number of blooms is this year. Three billion. Eight trillion. I’m pretty sure the counting is done by Enron.
Whatever. The point isn’t that we have umptillion flowers, but that we have any at all — something that Tourism Victoria emphasizes by sending bouquets of daffodils to media outlets across Canada and the northern U.S.
They say it’s all in good fun. Sure it is, just like mailing postcards from Mexico to the guys stuck back at work, or to inmates in solitary. OK, so it’s one-way fun.
That’s particularly true this year. Right now, shipping daffodils to Toronto is like giving cutlery to a starving man. The Centre Of The Universe just broke its alltime February snowfall record (a real problem in that the municipal emergency shovelling squad/Canadian army has gone to Afghanistan, which not only has a milder climate than Toronto, but less gunplay).
In fact, the entire Great White North has endured a winter straight out of The Day After Tomorrow. Easterners will be digging out until November. Manitobans pine for the balmy days of absolute zero. One of the guys at the TC is a farmboy from Block Heater, Saskatchewan, where it was so cold this winter that livestock dropped dead and nails worked their way out of frozen fence rails. Even the Lower Mainland was hammered with a series of snowstorms that just missed us, flicking our hair like passing blizzard bullets before smacking into Burnaby Mountain.
Snow does fall in Victoria, pretty much every year in fact, but usually you can treat it like a process server or angry spouse: Lock the doors and ignore it for a few hours and it will go away on its own. Only twice has snow been reported at Victoria’s airport in 2008 — a trace amount Feb. 4 and half a centimetre (the height of an end-of-the-pencil eraser) Jan. 29, just enough to trigger school closings, the declaration of martial law and the summoning of grief counsellors. We haven’t even had to think about picking up a snow shovel (or, rather, a boogie board duct-taped to a three-wood) since Dec. 2.
So, what do we do, whisper a prayer of gratitude for our good fortune? No, we gleefully rub our countrymen’s noses in it.
It’s not enough that that we’re firing up our lawnmowers while the rest of the country is still trying to thaw the gas line on the snowblower.
It’s not enough that Victoria is also a government town (always popular with the masses), seen as a plump and pampered repository of wealthy retirees and uncalloused nine-to-fivers prairiedogging among the office cubicles (our civic motto: It’s warm, it’s inside, and there’s no heavy lifting).
It’s not enough that the travel magazines gush like a busted water main whenever our name comes up. ( Condé Nast Traveler ranks Victoria as the third best city in the Americas, trailing only Buenos Aires and, for some reason, the pestilential cesspool known as Vancouver, while Travel and Leisure says we live on the sixth-best island in the world, sandwiched between Santorini, Greece, and Croatia’s Dalmatian Islands, all 101 of them.)
No, we also have to brag about our natural good looks and mild climate to our fellow Canadians, just in case four months of frostbitten brains have rendered them incapable of reading a weather map.
We’re like sultry-voiced Kelly LeBrock in that old Pantene shampoo commercial: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
No, Victoria, the rest of Canada doesn’t hate you because you’re beautiful. It hates you because you’re so smug about it.
But hey, we protest, even paradise has its problems — banana slugs, wet weekends, two-sailing waits (though why would you want to leave?) and house prices that read like phone numbers. Torontonians have to understand the hellish pressure that comes with trying to get 18 holes in before nightfall in February. Occasionally, Victorians need to relieve the stress of this breakneck lifestyle. Sometimes you have to stop and mail the flowers.
Copyright 2008 Times Colonist
