In the 1700s, Dutch bulbs supplemented the needle-petaled flowers the Turks grew themselves. Sultan Ahmet III regularly ordered thousands of bulbs from Dutch growers near Haarlem, where flower breeders also branched out into supplying the hyacinth bulbs that would fuel a separate mania. For most of the 18th century, the Dutch export trade was dominated by a handful of Haarlem growers.

As new farms were created by draining land near the sea, tulip growing shifted to the sandy clay soils of South and North Holland. The regions of Flevoland and the Noordoostpolder also began growing tulips, and today are known through postcard images of vast tulip beds.

By the late 19th century, the idea of planting dense beds of tulips as a landscape element had begun to take hold. The famous English gardener Gertrude Jekyll also favored mass plantings, but she wanted something more subtle. She began to blend two or more varieties in a single bed. Other influential gardeners favored the notion of allowing flowers to naturalize, creating the illusion of the fields strewn with tulips that, at their best, resembled the high flower-strewn fields of the steppes where tulips were first found the the wild.