Fields of wonder: our trip to the tulip farms of Holland

In April 2024, Alice and Emily packed their bags for a two-night trip to Leiden in Holland to see where the tulips you see in-store, begin their journey.

By Alice

After buying flowers for so many years, so many of them grown in or passing through Holland,  it was a no-brainer that Emily and I would accept the invitation to visit our suppliers' farms and glimpse how our tulips go from farm to shop. Both the business owner and the flower addict in me were desperate to see the operation in action!
We headed off for two nights in Leiden, a small city just outside Amsterdam with canal views to die for and, it turns out, a very, very good stroopwafel-to-square-metre ratio.

The fields

April is the tail end of tulip season in Holland, so when we arrived the fields were beginning to wind down - but they were in no way, any less extraordinary. Rows of vibrant reds, yellows, oranges and purples in every direction, colours that make you understand why Dutch artists kept reaching for their brushes.

Many of these farms are old - really old. Generation after generation of the same families, passing down not just the land but the knowledge, the methods, and the finer details like ‘how a bulb behaves in a certain soil’. We had the absolute pleasure of being shown around by the growers themselves, which was just brilliant. Walking the fields with someone who has known them their entire life is captivating. You come away with a deep understanding of the patience involved - the months of tending before a single stem is ready to cut, the precision of knowing exactly when to do it. It also gave us a deeper respect for what lands at our studio. Every tulip we work with began somewhere like this - in a field, with a grower, using methods steeped in wisdom.

The Dutch are so smart, as they manage to find the perfect balance of weaving traditional farming methods with new tech. Robots everywhere: photographing stems and uploading them direct to the webshop, picking flowers, quality controlling and packing orders. The scale and efficiency of it was remarkable. It was a beautiful thing to see - human touch, heritage and modernity, side by side.

Several of the farms even had picking gardens where visitors can cut their own stems, and small coffee stalls set among the rows. It was a delight for the senses.

Beyond the tulips

During our trip we also visited an orchid farm, which was a starkly different experience - vast, climate-controlled growing houses with thousands of plants at every stage of development. Orchids operate on their own timeline, and seeing that up close brought a new appreciation for varying conditions that different flowers demand.

We also had dinner with a group of other London-based florists who’d been invited on the same trip. An evening of good food, shop talk about blooms obviously and a mutual appreciation for the joy of mothers nature. The Dutch are generous hosts. We ate well. We talked a lot.

“It was a truly special experience for me. After working with flowers for over seven years, it’s easy to become a little desensitised to what you’re actually handling. Each bloom begins as a bulb or seed, carefully nurtured and grown before being cut, sent on its journey, and eventually arranged - then only to be passed along again to fulfil its purpose at a wedding, an event, or in someone’s home. It was a powerful reality check, reminding me just how much care, time, and effort goes into this industry.

Experiencing it alongside Alice made it even more meaningful. We also had so much fun - and ate a lot of stroopwafels.” 

Emily, Head Wedding Florist

What we brought home

Obviously tulips! But beyond the flowers, what we brought back was something more - a renewed sense of connection to the supply chain, a reminder of why we do this, and a real appreciation for the people and places behind every stem that arrives at our studio door. It’s easy, in the rhythm of weekly orders and wedding prep, to lose sight of that. Trips like this bring it back.

Final thoughts

This trip gave me everything I hoped it would — and then some. Seeing the full picture, from the robots sorting and packing stems at scale to the growers walking us through fields their grandparents once tended, made the whole industry feel more alive to me. It's one thing to order flowers every week. It's another to understand the extraordinary chain of knowledge, graft and care that gets them to your door.

I'd go back in a heartbeat.