From early-April to mid-May, over three million daffodils of every color, shape and size will bloom on Nantucket Island. This annual flowering is celebrated during the Massachusetts island’s Daffodil Festival Weekend, set for April 23-25, 2010. It’s sponsored by the Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce. The signature event is the Antique Car Parade, featuring more than 100 daffodil-bedecked antique cars. After winding through town and across the island to the village of Siasconset, participants join residents and visitors for the Daffodil Tailgate Picnic. Other highlights of the weekend are the Nantucket Garden Club’s Daffodil Show, Annual Daffy Dog Parade, Children’s Daffodil Parade and the Daffy Hat Pageant.

The festival was started by the late Jean MacAusland, a summer resident of Nantucket and former publisher of Gourmet magazine,who persuaded the Nantucket Garden Club to sponsor a daffodil show on the island in 1974. The first planting of daffodils took place along Milestone Road. Each year thousands of bulbs were added to the fields and roadsides, slowly achieving the ultimate goal of one million daffodils. In the early 1980s, Mrs. MacAusland ordered another eight tons of bulbs directly from the Netherlands and, with the help of professional landscapers, planted another 100,000 daffodil bulbs. Island residents embraced the idea with enthusiasm and many began to join in the planting. In the fall of 1994, the Garden Club planted an additional 10,000 “late-blooming” bulbs, hoping to extend the daffodil season. Today an estimated three million blossoms, which have naturalized over the years, bloom along the island’s roadsides, gardens and shop windows with blossoms of yellow, orange, white and even pale pink.