Wicked Tulips Flower Farm in Preston Brings Seasonal Joy
Children enjoying the tulips by BellaBlue Photography. Other photos courtesy of Wicked Tulips Flower Farm unless noted.
Early spring in Connecticut leaves one yearning for tastes of summer, but abundant farm produce is still a month away. Soft spring air is a good tonic, but a simple dose of outdoors is even better in a landscape that inspires awe. For several weeks in May, you can wander through a field of over half a million tulips in every shade of the rainbow at Wicked Tulips Flower Farm in Preston, CT. In this special place “where happiness blooms,” you can enjoy nature and bring some springtime home with you.
Wicked Tulips is a pick-your-own (PYO) flower and online bulb business owned and operated by Jeroen Koeman and his wife Keriann. The 6-acre field located on a former dairy farm in rural Preston is the third location of their popular PYO enterprise. Jeroen (pronounced “your roon”) is tall and slim, with a kind smile and rolling Dutch accent. The youngest son of four from a family of tulip growers in Holland, Jeroen came to the States in 2006. He met, fell in love with, and married Keriann. They launched an organic tulip bulb business in Virginia in 2009, where they offered the first large-scale PYO tulip event in the US. In 2015, they moved to New England, where Keriann grew up. It was closer to family and the climate was better for growing tulips. After several years of constantly selling out at their two farm locations in Rhode Island, they decided to expand Wicked Tulips into Connecticut.
(top right) Views of patrons enjoying the farm; (bottom right) Jeroen Koeman and his wife Keriann
The day I visit, the sky is low and gray, but the air is a perfect spring temperature. “The clouds sometimes make the tulips pop even more,” Jeroen says. His enthusiasm for the balm of nature’s beauty is entirely authentic. “When people come here, there’s a lot of ‘oh my gods’ and comments like ‘this is how life should be’,” he says. “It’s amazing to see the heaviness of society drop off people here. It’s like a child seeing a Christmas present…people feel such joy to see a tulip field. They feel gratitude to mother nature. I’m very proud we have created this… it’s a space for memories.” He says people get engaged among the tulips all the time. Families make it a tradition to return year after year.
As I wander the vibrant field, parents pose children holding baskets of flowers at picture-perfect backdrops—waves of tulips shaped like peonies or tropical birds of paradise, tulips with frilly edges or star-like petals or striped like candy. A thousand shades of purple, yellow, red, orange, pink, white- -hundreds of varieties, according to Jeroen. A photographer with a serious lens crouches down close to capture a velvety, deep purple “Queen of the Night” bloom. In another row, I overhear a woman tell her friend, “If it weren’t muddy, I’d lay down right in the middle of this!” A middle-aged man pushes an elderly woman in a wheelchair clutching a brilliant gold blossom, dirt still clinging to the pale stem. Jeroen chuckles as he admits, “Sometimes you see a husband dragged along, complaining, ‘Oh…. we have to pay $20 to pick flowers…’ but once they get into the field, it works for everyone. It’s an amazing thing to see.”
Although PYO events last just a few weeks in spring, Wicked Tulips is a year-round business for Jeroen and Keriann. Their small farm crew spends all year prepping fields, and they sell bulbs online. They plant over 1.5 million tulips in three locations every season. Wicked Tulips employs a large seasonal staff of friendly helpers who efficiently aid visitors in parking, picking, wrapping, and purchasing tulips. Ten stems are included with each adult ticket, and you can buy more for $1 a stem. Tickets are sold online in advance for time slots on specific dates to ease congestion and make the PYO experience calm and comfortable. “We don’t want overflowing lines or parking. We’re not interested in markets or food trucks,” says Jeroen. “We want nature to be the entertainment. Eventually, we want to expand into other crops such as daffodils and peonies and provide more opportunity for visitors to be amazed by nature.”
From left: Basket full of picked tulips; Even toddlers enjoy picking tulips
Every spring after the blooms have passed, Jeroen and his field crew dig up what’s left and compost everything. It’s too expensive to process, store, and re-use bulbs in New England, when he can buy bulbs from Holland, where they have been perfecting the crop for centuries. Then they plow a new field, rotating location for sustainability, using composted bulbs as “organic” fertilizer. “Here in Preston, the fields not been plowed for centuries,” says Jeroen. “The number of rocks I find is unbelievable.” It takes weeks of backbreaking work (luckily, they have machines now!) to ready the fields for fall planting.
Now in their third season in Preston, Wicked Tulips is attracting visitors from New Haven and Hartford areas. The fields in Rhode Island regularly draw day trippers from greater Boston and New Hampshire. In 2020, they put a request on social media for beautiful farmland to lease in CT. The Gasparinos in Preston had been retired for 20 years from dairy farming but wanted to keep their land in the family. Today, 6 acres of their fields are covered in tulips. “It’s a beautiful farm,” says Jeroen. “Just being here in the fall among the foliage, planting bulbs, is a privilege. It’s a beautiful destination for visitors, but it’s also a good place for my own soul.” And Eastern CT has a farm that welcomes visitors to experience the bliss of nature’s beauty. Win-win-win.
Wicked Tulips has three PYO locations: Exeter and Johnston, Rhode Island, and Preston, Connecticut, on Scenic Route 164--the largest farm with over 700,000 tulips and 100+ unique varieties. The bloom time at each farm is staggered to offer up to 6 weeks among all three locations, from late April through May depending on conditions. You can buy bulbs on-line year-round to be delivered in time to plant in fall. www.wickedtulips.com
Fun Fact: Tulips are edible. In Virginia, they sold petals to upscale restaurants. “Some are tasty, some are not,” says Jeroen. “You eat it kind of like an artichoke. First wipe off the pollen and bite the bottom of the petal, which is sometimes very sweet.” See a tulip salad recipe at www.mariasfarmcountrykitchen.com/organic-tulip-salad/
Wicked Tulips Flower Farm is located at 382 Route 164 in Preston.
www.wickedtulips.com
IG @wickedtulips
Plan now for next season!
