Watching the dahlia parade on a sunny day.

The winner in 2008, Group harbers paul.

Every flower parade in the Netherlands is a huge attraction, drawing tourists from home and abroad. Every year, spectacular flower parades throughout the Netherlands can be seen from April through September.

I just want to tell something about the bloemencorso in Lichtenvoorde, which is the closest to me and where I have participated some years. The ideas and designs are developed early every year. It’s a huge job to build a float so you have to start as soon as possible. This flower parade in Lichtenvoorde has 20 participants who build a float with 100.000 till 300.000 flowers per float, and a lot of small ones build by children. This parade is a typical dahlia-parade. That means that only the flower “dahlia” is used to create the float, but you are allowed to use a little bit other stuff for decoration. In Lichtenvoorde a significant number of dahlias you should grow yourself.

A typical dahlia.

Groups are created by friends or family, neighbors or streets. The biggest job is to get the flowers in 2 days on your float. So they start on Friday morning and you keep on going till it is finished. Mostly the work is done between Saturday evening 22:00 and 6:00 am Sunday morning.

The flower parade in Lichtenvoorde takes place every year at the second Sunday in September at 2pm. It starts with all the children and some music bands and after that the big ones.

All the info you want, can be found at: http://www.bloemencorso.com/
The site is in Dutch and German…. Sorry no English.

Last year I took a lot of pictures! Enjoy the flower parade from 2008.