On Saturday, 17 January 2026, the Netherlands will officially kick off the tulip season with Tulip Day. At Amsterdam's Museumplein, growers will once again create a huge pick-your-own garden filled with 200,000 tulips, this year under the theme "United in Bloom". From 13:00 onwards, everyone is welcome to pick a free bouquet.
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Connection
Arjan Smit, chair of the Tulip Promotion Netherlands Foundation (TPN), explains, "This year's theme highlights how tulips bring people together, stir emotions and speak a language everyone understands. You can feel that sense of togetherness every Tulip Day, and it is exactly what turns the event into such a joyful celebration of flowers."
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National celebration
The kick-off event in Amsterdam has been inspiring florists, supermarkets and shop owners across the country for years to create their own Tulip Day activities. "It is wonderful to see," Smit says. "Mini pick-your-own gardens pop up in shopping streets, florists host tulip workshops and everywhere you look you see orange tulip flags and the new Tulip Day poster. If it is up to us, Tulip Day will once again grow into a nationwide celebration in 2026."
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Sustainability central
Sustainability is a key priority in Dutch cut-tulip production. Forcing growers work without crop protection chemicals, and thanks to multilayer propagation systems, the energy needed per tulip has been dropping significantly for years. Some growers are now producing completely CO₂-neutral tulips. At Museumplein, information boards will explain these developments to visitors. Smit adds, "We choose full transparency toward both the public and our critics. That is why an independent research agency will take samples from the tulips in the pick-your-own garden."
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International
Since 2012, the Netherlands has celebrated Tulip Day on the third Saturday of January. TPN is also actively building international connections. More and more countries are discovering how tulips and a temporary pick-your-own garden can bring people together in urban spaces, not only as an iconic agricultural product, but also as a powerful promotional tool and an economic driver for hosting a Tulip Day event. The concept is steadily gaining popularity abroad. In Belgium (17 January, Antwerp), Germany (14 March, Berlin) and the United States (21 March, San Francisco), pick-your-own gardens filled with colourful tulips will also be created.
Source: Tulip Day
