Publisher’s Note: Tulipalooza organizers have moved the opening date for the tulip festival up one week to Friday, March 8, 2024.
Putting Waxahachie on the map of annual springtime flower festivals in Texas, the ten-day tulip festival known as Tulipalooza takes place each March and will have a new location for 2024.
2024 Tulipalooza Time and Location
The 2024 Tulipalooza Tulip Festival is set for 10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. every day from March 8-17, 2024 at its new location at the entrance of Getzendaner Park at 400 S Grand Ave, Waxahachie, TX 75165.
2024 Tuilpalooza Ticket Prices
The 2024 Tulipalooza ticket price is $15 per adult, and $5 per child.
Children under five years old are admitted free of charge.
Senior citizens may enter the festival on March 19, 2024 for the reduced ticket price of $12 each.
Anyone wanting to take home a piece of Tulipalloza can pick a bouquet of tulips for $2.50 per flower, or $20 per bunch of 10.
Tickets may be purchased at the festival entrance or online at tulipalooza.org.
2024 Tulipalooza Attractions
The principle attraction for the 2024 Tulipalooza season is the blooming of approximately 300,000 tulip bulbs in a variety of cultivars and colors. Festival guests can stroll through the tulips, take plenty of selfies and pick their own bouquets.
Additional activities include live music, vendors, food trucks and a classic car show on the weekend; see the Tulipalooza website for a full schedule.
Throughout the season, volunteers dressed in traditional Dutch attire will answer questions and pose for thematic photos with guests.
New for Tulipalooza 2024
More colors and more varieties of bulbs will bloom during Tuilpalooza 2024, says Dallas-based horticultural consultant Bill Van Houten, who coordinates the planting of the festival’s tulips.
“Our intention is to plant a little over 300,000 bulbs in 15 different varieties, so I’m going to make bays of 20,000 per variety in a wider range of colors, from reds to oranges to yellow to purple and even a white tulips. And so all this is going to make for perfect picture taking,” Bill told us as he prepared for planting in 2023.
Also, the location has moved to the entrance of Waxahachie’s flagship city park, Getzendaner Park — a move that Bill says is part of a management strategy that helps the bulbs escape the emergence of insects and pathogens that develop after about three years of tulip bulbs growing in the same area.
The festival grounds were formerly the site of the recently demolished Baylor Hospital in Old Waxahachie. Since 2021, Tulipalooza has taken place on the north side of the city in a field adjacent to the Waxahachie Civic Center. For 2024, festival organizers and city leaders felt that not only would the old hospital site offer a location well suited for the flower bulbs, but also Getzendaner Park would allow for ample parking in a scenic, natural harbor of sorts that would help to help to shield the tulips from unpredictable weather.
“We determined that this would be the perfect location for us going forward, or at least for the next three years until they might have to rotate elsewhere,” Bill says. “There’s more parking there and everybody is familiar with that parklike setting, and it more or less mimics what we are used to in Holland, where most of these gardens have trees and shrubs around the actual planting to make it a lot more of an inviting setting.”
2024 Tulipalooza Charitable Contributions
Since its beginning, Tulipalooza was organized as a charitable event that would raise thousands of dollars for Texas-based nonprofits that benefit children, the physically and mentally challenged, and those experiencing extreme hardships. Thus, proceeds from 2024 Tulipalooza ticket sales will benefit the following 11 local nonprofit organizations:
Waxahachie Care
A food bank serving all of Ellis County.
The Ashford Rise School of Dallas
A program that provides the highest quality of early education services to children ages six months to six years with and without disabilities in an inclusive environment.
Touchdown Club of Dallas
A nonprofit organization of like-minded men working together to raise charitable donations and contributions that benefit the Ashford Rise School of Dallas.
United Way of Ellis County
An organization that benefits people’s lives by strategically channeling community resources.
YMCA of Waxahachie
An organization serving Waxahachie and Midlothian by bringing health and wellness programs and after-school care within reach of the residents of these communities, and helping economically-stressed families to enjoy these programs through financial assistance when needed.
Special Olympics Texas
An organization that works to create a new world of inclusion and community where every person is accepted and welcomed regardless of ability or disability.
The Heights
A religious organization working to unite other agencies together to serve the victims of family abuse in ways that provide public safety in addition to social work.
Lonestar Easterseals
An organization that responds to the needs of people with disabilities, families, and communities with outcome-based services, providing support throughout their lives.
Hendrick Scholarship Foundation
A nonprofit that provides scholarships and support services to Plano I.S.D. graduates who have overcome significant adversity.
Goodwill Dallas
An organization that exists to help persons with barriers recognize and reach their full potential and experience a life filled with purpose, accomplishment, and self-sufficiency.
To Be Like Me
A nonprofit that promotes disability awareness education led by people living with disabilities to students and teachers throughout North Texas.
The Process of Making Tulipalooza Happen
Bill says that making Tulipalooza happen each spring requires the full year to coordinate.
First, Tulipalooza organizers work with Waxahachie city leaders to book the most suitable site for the event, which changes every several years for purposes of crop rotation and pest management practices. Bill then coordinates the selection and importation of tulip bulbs from Holland several months before the tulips are to be planted.
Because Texas has a warm climate that’s hostile to a flower species that originally evolved in the cooler regions of Central Asia, the tulip bulbs must be purchased fresh each year and stored in cold storage at 48° Fahrenheit for several months before being planted in December at the festival site using special equipment imported from Holland. Then, the bulbs send up shoots and bloom briefly several months later.
“Every year when the festival is over in March, I get online with my partner in Holland who is functioning as the purchasing agent out there, and at that time we push the button for the bulbs to be bought in March and April, for them to be harvested in July, then shipped to the United States in August and cooled in Dallas from September till December,” Bill says. “But these bulbs basically expend their lifespan in one cycle, and the reason usually is that it gets too warm in Texas; there’s not enough cooling for these bulbs to do it another year.”
Each year, organizers watch the weather and the progress of the tulips to ensure that they do indeed bloom during the festival dates publicized on social media, on billboards and on the Tulipalooza website. In 2023, the weather induced a bloom earlier than the date that was initially promoted, and organizers had to make a last-minute decision to open the festival one week prior to the publicized date.
“The tulips all over Texas were a good 10 – 14 days early and that not only happened in Waxahachie, it happened for the Dallas Arboretum also; it happened with the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. The crops were spurred on by Mother Nature because of the high temperatures the late afternoons when we had temperatures in the 70s and 80s in in the North Texas region,” Bill says.
Tulipalooza’s Past and Future
The idea of hosting a tulip festival in Waxahachie originated with John Poston, founder and president of Daymark Living in Waxahachie, which is a 24-hour living facility for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities such as Down Syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy and traumatic brain injury. In addition to offering challenged adults independence, the operation helps residents to learn job skills and gain further education.
John said in an interview with Waxahachie 360 in 2021 that he held the first Tulipalooza as a sort of publicity stunt to bring attention to the offerings of the newly opened living facility and to raise funds for financial assistance for Daymark residents.
“The whole reason behind it is to bring awareness to Daymark Living and raise money for scholarships so that low-income families that couldn’t otherwise afford to send their loved one there can afford to live there,” John said.
Having met the Dutch-born Tamminga family in Waxahachie and having visited tulip festivals in the North, John decided to bring a tulip-centric event to Waxahachie. The first Tulipalooza was held near Daymark Living, and the site was dubbed Poston Gardens.
After several years of being involved with the festival, John eventually handed over Tulipalooza to Bill, the Tammingas and other volunteers who have organized the festival annually ever since.
As one of the few all-tulip festivals in the South, Tulipalooza attracts about 30,000 visitors from Texas and nearby states to Waxahachie every year.
Bill says the he’d like to see Tulipalooza stay at a permanent location, which would require enough land to allow for crop rotation every two or three years. He’s also exploring how crop rotation can be achieved by incorporating other flowers on the festival site, too.
“Our goal is to make this an ongoing annual event,” Bill says. “This is highly supported by the city — they want to make the city a destination for tours; they want to make the downtown area of Waxahachie, its history, etcetera a [popular tour] destination, and we feel like that if we can help beautify not only the downtown area by way of our tulips, but also this little piece of Holland that we’re trying to do at Getzendaner Park — we feel that we will play a part of that.”