Senior landscape architect Tina Liu is responsible for up to 700,000 tulip bulbs planted by the National Capital Commission (NCC) each year in Ottawa.

Typically, those tulips would start blooming in April, in staggered cohorts, so the 120 flower beds she oversees at 30 different sites are awash in colour in time for the hundreds of thousands of people who flock to Ottawa for the Canadian Tulip Festival each May.

But this year, in mid-March, some of the tulips are already poking out of the ground by a good two inches, putting them on schedule to bloom one-and-a-half weeks to two weeks early, says Liu, who has overseen the garden beds with the NCC for the past 15 years and says the bloom times have been creeping earlier for the past five years.

“We have seen the effects of climate change,” Liu told CBC News. “We have to be really responsive to Mother Nature with these early springs.”