Welcome spring with a celebration of daffodils

Spring officially arrives in Washington this Saturday at 10:32 a.m., and perhaps the best symbol of the season around Puget Sound is the blooming daffodil.

There are more than one daffodil-centric ways to welcome the season:

• Start with Friday's downtown Seattle daffodil giveaway, sponsored and organized by the Pike Place Market. From 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., market friends and affiliates, including a couple of Seattle City Council members, will hand out 12,000 daffodils grown by market farmers to shoppers, workers and other downtown visitors. This is the 13th year for the annual spring daffodil giveaway.

Look for daffodil distributors in the downtown core from Third to Sixth avenues, between Marion Street and Olive Way. Nice weather is in the forecast.

• If that doesn't satisfy your daffodil craving, take a daffodil drive to the Skagit or Puyallup valleys, where hundreds of acres of daffodils are in bloom between Mount Vernon and La Conner in the Skagit Valley and around Sumner, Puyallup and Orting in the Puyallup Valley.

For a map of daffodil (and tulip and iris) fields in the Skagit Valley, see www.tulips.com/bloommap.cfm.

Skagit Valley growers say tulip fields are expected to begin blooming in the next two weeks. The annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is April 1-30. See www.tulipfestival.org.

• In the Puyallup Valley, the annual Daffodil Festival's parade circuit gets under way with the Junior Daffodil Parade in Tacoma's Proctor District March 27. The festival's Grand Floral Parade, a daylong event that travels from Tacoma to Puyallup to Sumner to Orting, is April 10. A parade for boaters is April 18. See www.daffodilfestival.net.