For those of you paying the full retail price for tulip bulbs...
I happen to live in an area in Washington State called the Skagit Valley.
We are crisscrossed with dikes and blessed with drizzling damp weather
like the tulips' ancestors had in the Netherlands.
We grow millions of tulips here, and a large proportion of them
are shipped to the Netherlands, where they are either matured for
an additional year, or simply repackaged and exported.
Either way the bulbs are literally "Exported from the Netherlands".
Of course at every step along the way, someone makes money
from the process, until the consumer pays a goodly price at the
end of the chain. Being a local, I get my bulbs cheaply.
As students of Simplicity, I thought some folks would
appreciate the irony of it, but please keep buying
tulip bulbs in the stores or Amazon; our Valley profits by it,
and we have a tranquil agricultural environment here.
My son-in-law's family back in the Netherlands profits indirectly
from it through the boost it gives the Dutch economy.
I hear there are places in the Midwest with the same arrangement.