flowers

The Zundert Flower Parade has been running since 1936. Around twenty hamlets near the town of Zundert build the best floats they can in order to establish their name at the annual flower parade. The flower parade uses only dahlias. After a whole year of work and preparations, the parade is celebrated on the first Sunday of September each year. The colorful creations of the Zundert Flower Parade attract tens of thousands of visitors every year.

Everything is done by volunteers, even the cultivation of the dahlias. In order to prepare the floats for the big parade, hundreds of people join together. The art of building the Zundert Parade floats has been passed down from generation to generation. A staggering six to eight million dahlia flowers are used to produce the floats. Huge floats are made of wire, cardboard and papier-mâché and entirely covered in dahlias in intricate designs. The dahlias for grown specifically for the parade and thousands of them are required just to cover one float. The floats are made by twenty different hamlets and each of them consists of hundreds of builders, aged 1 to 100, who are all equally crazy about the Bloemencorso. The older members of the hamlet are often responsible for planting and growing the dahlias, while the younger ones build the float in large temporary tents that are built exclusively for the event. In Zundert, flower floats aren’t just pretty but they contain movement, can be blown up, frozen in ice or besmirched in paint.The floats are prepared as early as May or June with papier-mâché and wire - but to ensure the brilliance of the flowers the dahlias are only attached three days before the parade.

During the Zundert Flower Parade the town is charged with excitement. On Sunday and Monday, all kinds of music and theater performances are conducted for all. Zundert is on the border with Belgium, so the flower parade for both Dutch and Belgians to enjoy.

The tiny town of Zundert is most famously known as the birthplace of master painted Vincent Van Gogh, and the Bloemencorso parade honors his artistic spirit. The town’s tradition is to only use dahlia flowers to decorate each float, shows the transformative power that flowers can achieve with a little imagination!

for more, visit : http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/09/corso-zundert-flower-parade-2014/