In case you haven’t heard, Canada is celebrating their 150th birthday this year and it’s been kind of a big deal. In fact, the government started telling us about all the ways we were going to celebrate before we even hit 149. One thing we had over a year to get hyped about were these amazing Canada 150 tulips with petals that look like a Canadian flag.

Pretty awesome, right? Yeah, the whole country thought so. They were available for purchase exclusively from Home Hardware and the company sold four million of them. We expected all of Canada to be in full red and white bloom by now. But something went a little bit sideways. You see, the tulips are definitely blooming, but they’re popping up yellow. Whoops.

That’s not exactly what we were expecting. Home Hardware says they’re in contact with the supplier in the Netherlands to try to locate where things went wrong. The tulips were actually a thank-you gift from the Netherlands for Canada’s involvement in World War II and to acknowledge our 150th birthday.

It’s not all bad though. Some of the tulips may be yellow, but just because they start out that colour doesn’t mean you won’t see that Canadian flag at some point. Apparently they’ve been known to change colour.

‘They seem to be magical tulips in some cases,’ a Home Hardware spokesperson said, ‘we’ve had reports where they come up yellow and red and then a number of weeks later customers will email us back and say, ‘Well, they’ve turned white and red.” So there’s hope yet for those yellow flowers.

Thankfully it looks like the Canada 150 tulip performed as it was intended to at the Ottawa Tulip Festival this week. Look at all that red and white.

In typical Canadian fashion, most people aren’t all that upset about their less-than-patriotic gardens. Most are slightly disappointed but acknowledge that the flowers are still beautiful. We guess this is a lesson that no matter how far we come with technology, you just can’t tame nature.