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For one week at the end of February the citizens of Greater Victoria count all the blossoms they can find. The results are then reported to volunteers at Flower Count Headquarters by telephone - 360-BUDS (2837) and prizes are awarded to callers chosen at random each day. As the numbers come in, announcements are sent to local media to inform everyone of the growing count.

How to count

• Small tree full of blossoms 250,000 blossoms
• Medium tree full of blossoms 500,000
• Large tree full of blossoms 750,000
• Small Heather bush 500
• Medium Heather bush 1,000
• Large Heather bush 2,00

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