Nearly 1 million flowers bloom in Utah County this spring. Here’s the man who helps organize it all.

Tony Latimer takes pride in the state of his office. He knows every speck of soil and bed of blooms like he has planted each one himself.

From bright blossoms to keen koi fish, Latimer’s office spans some 50 acres. For 25 years, Latimer has been the go-to horticulturist at the Thanksgiving Point Institute, which facilitates one of Utah’s most well-known spring attractions: the annual Tulip Festival.

Latimer knows why one bed of tulips is growing slower than the other (it’s in the shade), why they added tulips to an area with roses (roses take longer to bloom) and which tulip blooms don’t last long (but give a bright pop of color).

This year’s festival, open until May 17, is Latimer’s largest challenge to date — with over 900,000 flowers adding pops of color to Lehi’s Ashton Gardens.

“The garden changes so much so quickly,” he says, walking through his office on a Monday in late April. “If you don’t get it watered when it needs to be watered, you can do a lot of damage fast. It’ll take months to recover.”

Over 400,000 of this year’s flowers are imported tulips, while the 550,000 others are various spring blooms like daffodils, hyacinths, poppies and more. There are 129 different varieties of tulips, each one blooming at a different time, so visitors get a different perspective of the event no matter when they come during the six weeks it’s open.

While the festival has become something of a spring destination — a place where families come to take photos, enjoy the outdoors after a lingering winter and learn about flowers — it wasn’t always that way, according to Latimer.

“In 2000 in the fall, we planted our first tulips, and then spring came in 2001 and we really didn’t get any uptake, or too many people who came out,” Latimer recalled. “We did that for a couple years, and then finally, somebody had the bright idea in 2004 to have a Tulip Festival.”

The event took off from there, going from three days to two weeks, then to three weeks and now six.

“We laugh at what we used to call the tulip festival, just because we would probably have about 250,000 tulips,” Latimer said. He estimates that it takes around 5,000 hours of prep and getting the plants in the ground to get the festival up and running.

They plant in late September or early October, and by the time the festival opens for the public, they already are planning for the next one.

While Latimer leads the planting push, the team consists of 16 gardeners, a mowing and landscape crew, and designer Esther Hendrickson, an expert in colors and textures who helps design the beds to make the garden the most visually appealing.

Every year, the festival layout changes, Latimer said.

“We’ll buy all brand new, that way we can totally redesign every single bed. You won’t see the same thing you saw last year,” he said.

Even as the landscape changes, Latimer knows every inch of the garden. He walks through it as often as he can, taking notes of things he notices or feedback he overhears from visitors.

His team takes that feedback into account: like changing an umbrella activation to paper lanterns in the trees, or adding a more Dutch-feel to the festival.

Hallie Gehring, from Pleasant Grove, has gone to the Tulip Festival with her family for 20 years. A trip to Ashton Gardens is a tradition in her family, particularly because her great grandmother loved going every year, and stopping at the Trellis Café for a treat.

“We still do it. We always think of her,” Gehring said. Now, at 22, Gehring takes her three-year-old brother every year.

Gehring said for her, attending the Tulip Festival is akin to stepping into “a new world.”

“I almost feel like I’m transported to a different place … of peace and tranquility and just absolute beauty,” she said. As she has grown older, Gehring has learned to appreciate the work that goes into creating that beauty, and the other elements that add to the garden, such as the architecture.

“The scale of it is impossible for me to comprehend,” Gehring said.

On a recent walk through, Latimer overheard a patron comment on how lucky the timing was for a crab apple tree to bloom at the same time as a patch of tulips underneath it — the bright magenta floral color reflected on top in the branches and in the bed of flowers beneath it.

That, of course, was all by design.

Latimer’s favorite part of his job is walking through his office and overhearing people’s reactions. Hearing a “wow” is his greatest joy.

“I do gardens at my house, and sometimes it looks good, but I’m really the only one that enjoys it, and so it’s nice to see other people enjoy it,” he said.