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Whether it’s the lack of puffer jackets visible on the subway or the emerging cherry blossoms all throughout the city, there are signs everywhere that we’ve finally, officially entered Spring. Nothing embodies our warmer weather mood better than tulips, and Union Square is about to bring us the most incredible display of the flowers that most of us on this side of the Atlantic have ever seen.
So if you find yourself at Union Square on Sunday, April 7 between 11:30am and 3pm and feel like you’ve been teleported to the Netherlands, we won’t blame you, considering there will be a staggering 200,000 tulips on display for the city’s first-ever Tulip Day. The best part? You’ll get the chance to pick a bouquet of ten tulips of your choice for free.
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This event is the work of Royal Anthos, an organization that represents Dutch companies that trade in flower bulbs, and the Consulate General of the Netherlands. Tulip Day has been celebrated in San Francisco in the past and the organizers of the event hope to make this an annual New York City tradition.
In the Netherlands, tulip season starts in mid-March and continues through around mid-May. Although the Netherlands is known worldwide for its tulips, they actually first imported the flowers in the 16th Century from what is modern-day Turkey. At one point, tulips were so valuable in the northern European country that they were traded as currency. Today, the tulip industry there is worth billions and more than 75% of all the tulips traded worldwide are grown in the Netherlands, per the Amsterdam Tulip Museum.
This year’s Tulip Day is part of FUTURE 400, an initiative by the Consulate General of the Netherlands to mark 400 years of Dutch New York history. The Dutch arrived in what is now New York in 1624 to establish New Amsterdam, and FUTURE 400 hopes to approach Dutch colonial history through a more complete and honest lens, which includes acknowledging the forcible displacement of Native Americans and repression of communities of color that occurred as a direct result of a European presence on the continent.
The tulips will only be available for a few hours, so make sure to plan ahead to make the most out of the day. To make sure you get your own bouquet, you can pre-register for free here.