We only went out for groceries last weekend, and instead what we came to as we drove to and from our destination was this:

It’s that time of the year in the Netherlands. Lots of tulips fields are sprouting out from this vast, flat land transforming the landscape into colourful wonders of beauty. It’s a beautiful time to be here.

We may be living in a little hole of The Netherlands, but this hole has plenty of blooms to watch for at this time of the year. For us, a scene like this is now an every day sighting. The fields are just (almost) round the corner of our little village; mere minutes drive away, (almost) right in our own backyard. 

Take heed though: The tulips don’t last long. They are being grown for their bulbs and as soon as they start flowering, the farmers would cut them off. All of this happens within a span of a few days or sometimes, within the day. 

The tulips season here is never a certainty for a specific time. One really has to be at the right time and at the right place. We have been truly lucky in the last few years for, every time we came here to visit, be it in early April or early May, we somehow managed to catch the sights.

With such privilege in our backyard, we don’t really need to head off to Keukenhof (which by the way, is a very nice place to go to if not for the fact that it would be super crowded, touristy and almost impossible to get to at this time of the year due to traffic).

It really doesn’t get any better than this.

Plus, we get to buy bouquets of authentic and original tulips for almost nothing from “langs de weg” (on the roadside, usually placed in a cart just outside the house).

 

Priced only €1.25 per bunch, these bouquets are systematically placed in buckets in the front of one of the homes in our neighbourhood. Further into the front porch, many other variety of flowers are offered on sale as well.

One of the best part about buying them langs de weg is the fact that we never know what kind or colours of tulips we’ll get. Each bunch is always a surprise, although it will not be often that you find them to be terribly unsightly and unappealing.