I haven’t had a chance to make it out to the Tesselaar tulip festival this year (though there’s one weekend left and I’m hopeful!) but I got a chance to go last year and loved it.

Tulips are my favourite flowers. I lived in Japan for a year and loved the cherry and plum blossoms but I also completely fell for tulips (I’ve written about the Nabana no Sato winter illumination before here https://clairehereandthere.com/2016/12/18/nabana-no-sato-winter-illumination-or-the-most-fairy-lights-youll-ever-see/).

Somehow I hadn’t heard of the Tesselaar tulip festival before – even though it’s only about an hour out of Melbourne, so easily visited on a day trip. As soon as I heard of it, I got a small group of friends together, booked our tickets, and we headed out for a day trip. We were a little worried because the day was grey and a little drizzly, and we were hoping for sun and blue skies. We got lucky though! As we pulled in to park, the clouds pulled back from the skies just enough to let some sun through though still hanging around for a stormy type of beautiful.

I was kind of glad about the clouds for two reasons: one is that I burn really easily (even with my handy umbrella/parasole) and the second was that it kept the crowds away somewhat (still pretty busy but not as bad as it might have been).

We had fun wandering around – after a compulsory coffee cart stop – checking out the jazz band and the food stalls, but the flowers were of course the real stars of the show. The trickiest thing was that everyone agreed so the paths between the rows of bulbs was somewhat muddy and slippery from recent rain and thousands of footfalls.

Now I mentioned tulips are my favourite flower; I think it’s because they come in pretty much every colour and in pastels right through to shades so intense you almost have to leach some of the colour out of any photos you take.

If you’re in the area – or even in Melbourne – I’d definitely recommend visiting the festival – the colours are amazing and there’s nothing quite like walking down aisles of beautiful blooms. Even better is that there will always be a colour to match your outfit or your hair!

So, given that I said the flowers were the star of the show, I should hand over to some photos of them! Enjoy some gorgeous colours in the pictures below and then go enjoy them yourself at the festival!