The story begins in 1940, when Germany invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch royal family fled. Queen Wilhelmina escaped to London, where she ran a government-in-exile. Her daughter, Crown Princess Juliana, heir presumptive to the Dutch throne, was sent further away for safety. She and her two young daughters, Beatrix and Irene, crossed the Atlantic and settled in Ottawa, Canada.
For three years, the royal family lived there quietly. Juliana sent her children to local schools. She shopped in neighborhood stores. She became a familiar, well-liked figure in the capital. In the autumn of 1942, Juliana announced she was pregnant with her third child. That's when the lawyers got involved.
The problem was citizenship. Canada grants citizenship to anyone born on Canadian soil. If Juliana's baby was born in Ottawa, the child would automatically become a Canadian citizen and a British subject. Under the Dutch constitution, that could complicate the child's place in the royal succession.
The solution had to be precise. Canada could not declare a hospital room to be Dutch territory. No country has that power over another's land. But Canada could do something else.
On December 26, 1942, King George VI, acting in his role as King of Canada, signed a proclamation under the War Measures Act. It declared that the place where Juliana gave birth would be temporarily extraterritorial. For the duration of the birth, that space would not be Canadian soil.
The baby's Dutch citizenship would come through her mother's bloodline, as Dutch law allows. But the baby would not also become Canadian, because she would not technically be born in Canada.
Four rooms on the third floor of Ottawa Civic Hospital were set aside for Juliana. One for the princess. One for the baby. One for her nurse. One for a security guard. The rooms overlooked Holland Avenue.
On January 19, 1943, Princess Margriet Francisca was born. She was the first and only royal ever born in North America. She was named after the marguerite, the flower worn by Dutch citizens as a symbol of resistance to the Nazi occupation.
In the occupied Netherlands, the news of her birth was a rare moment of hope. The royal family still existed. A new princess had arrived. The future had not been extinguished.
The war continued for two more years. In 1945, it was the First Canadian Army that led the liberation of the Netherlands. When they arrived, they found a starving population. The last months of the occupation, known as the Hunger Winter, had devastated the country. Canadian forces distributed food and supplies. Many Dutch civilians saw them not just as liberators but as the people who kept them alive.
After the war, the royal family returned home. And Princess Juliana wanted to say thank you.
In the autumn of 1945, she sent one hundred thousand tulip bulbs to Ottawa. The following year, she sent another twenty thousand and asked that a flower bed be created at the hospital where Margriet was born. She promised to send ten thousand more every year.
She kept that promise. After she became Queen in 1948, the gifts continued. Today, eighty years later, the Netherlands still sends twenty thousand tulip bulbs to Ottawa every spring. Ten thousand from the royal family. Ten thousand from the Dutch Bulb Growers Association on behalf of the people of the Netherlands.
The bulbs are planted in two beds. One at the Ottawa Hospital's Civic Campus, where Margriet was born. The other in Commissioners Park, in a bed named after Queen Juliana.
Every May, over a million tulips bloom across Ottawa. The Canadian Tulip Festival draws more than six hundred and fifty thousand visitors. The tulip was designated Ottawa's official flower in 2001.
If you have ever received a gift so generous it changed the way you thought about the person who gave it, you understand what a hundred thousand bulbs meant to a city that had kept a family safe.
Princess Margriet is still alive. She has returned to Canada many times. On a visit in 2017, she said simply: "I was born in Canada. So somehow, quite naturally, I feel strongly attached to my place of birth."
A hospital room that temporarily stopped being a country. A princess born in a space between nations. And millions of flowers, returning every spring, reminding two countries that some debts are paid not in currency but in color.
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| Commissioners Park, Ottawa |
