Our Top 8 Favorite Spots for Wildflowers and Where to Find Them
While gardens and festivals prepare for years to fashion their blooms in pleasing shapes, wildflowers fields don’t care where they grow. The true rebellious spirit of wildflowers often captures the hearts of vacationers who want to see nature in its truest form. If you want to experience some of these fields for yourself, check out our favorite 8 wildflower locations.
The 8 Best Places to See Free-Growing Wildflowers
1. Bluebonnet Festival: Burnet, Texas
Every April in Texas, bluebonnets sprout wildly along the roadsides and countrysides. The annual Bluebonnet Festival showcases this wonderful lupin, as well as the red equivalent, the Prairie-Fire. If you live in Dallas but don’t want to take the 3-hour trip to experience the festival first hand, order online through a local Dallas florist to purchase your own bluebonnets.
2. Tibetan Plateau: Yunnan, China
No gardeners were involved in the making of the Tibetan Plateau wildflower site, but it’s so picturesque you’d assume otherwise. In Yunnan, yellow and pink Himalayan cowslips litter the countryside, but multiple colors are visible from the hilltop. The hill grows these cowslips around late June, but you may be able to see the nomocharis in early July if you’re lucky.
3. Kipandi Native Plants and Orchid Garden: Sabah, Malaysia
Although the name can be deceiving, the Kipandi Garden isn’t actually a garden but consists of free-living fauna and flora. The tropical jungles of Sabah allow for rafflesia, nepenthes, waxflowers, and lipstick plants to grow, but the most incredible and rare of all is located deep inside. The corpse flower, which scent compares to spoiled meat, sits among the foliage.
4. Great Southern Train Rail: Western Australia
The vast majority of Australia is uninhabitable due to the lack of lakes, dangerous animals, and ungrowable land. While that’s bad news for humans, it’s great news for fringed lilies, starflowers, and the pepper and salt shrubs that grow wild in Western Australia. There are over 12,000 flower species that grow between June and November, so take a train ride to view them all.
5. Chatham Islands: Waitangi, New Zealand
Like Australia, most of New Zealand isn’t habitable by humans, so wildflowers can grow in the lush. Forget-me-nots, the Hebe Barker, and the Chatham Island Kakaha are all large evergreen plants that thrive in that region. If you don’t want to go on an adventure in the outback, you can see those plants and more at the White Garden in the town of Sissinghurst.
6. Cape of Good Hope: South Africa Landscape
South Africa is home to over 9000 plant species, 75% of which are found only in that area of the world. You’ll still see common gardening plants like the restios, proteas, and freesias, but most of them are allowed to thrive because of the country’s long hot summers. It can take 2 days to see the 200km coastal rim full of flowering plants only available from August to September.
7. Kyoto Flower Festival: Kyoto, Japan
Although cherry blossom trees don’t technically sprout their flowers from the ground, the sheer amount of wild-growing trees have made them rebellious in their own right. While some of the most ambitious blooms will open in January, their prime season is late March and early April. You have a small window to see these blooms, as their petals will quickly fall from its branches.
8. Himalayan Marigolds: Uttarakhand, India
The Himalayan mountains are unforgivingly gold, but farther down the mountain’s peak are wild-growing marigolds that grow between June and October in Uttarakhand’s National Park. The entire West Himalayan valley is considered a UNESCO cultural spot, and it isn’t hard to see why when the hills sprout with orange marigolds, poppies, orchids, lilies, and daisies.