Did You Know? Taiwan’s Most Famous Flower Sea Started Out as Fertilizer

November in central Taiwan means the hills around Xinshe (新社), a farming district in Taichung’s mountains, turn pink, white and gold. This is the Xinshe Flower Sea (新社花海), one of Taiwan’s best-loved autumn day trips. Here’s the fun part: it started out as fertilizer.

Flowers That Feed the Soil

Taiwanese farmers have a clever trick for the months when a field is resting between crops. They don’t leave the soil bare. They sow it with “landscape green manure” (景觀綠肥), fast-growing flowers like cosmos (波斯菊), yellow cosmos, sunflowers and zinnias. The flowers bloom, everyone enjoys the view, and then the whole field is ploughed back under. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture, that adds organic matter and improves the soil for the next crop. Basically, it’s a field that’s beautiful and doing its homework.

You’ll see the same idea in the east every winter, when rapeseed turns the rice paddies of the East Rift Valley yellow.

The Open Day That Accidentally Became a Festival

Xinshe’s flower sea started almost by accident. In late October 2005, the government’s Seed Improvement and Propagation Station (種苗改良繁殖場) held a two-day open day at its second farm in Xinshe. For the occasion, it scattered sunflowers, rapeseed and cosmos, “green manure flowers,” across 32 of the farm’s 50 hectares. Huge crowds showed up that nobody had planned for.

The next year, the station brought in five nearby townships and their farmers’ associations and gave the event a name: Xinshe Flower Sea. In 2011, Taichung’s International Flower Carpet Festival moved onto the same fields, which is why today’s event pairs the flower sea with giant designs made of living flowers. For most of the year, the farm grows seed crops like feed corn and sorghum, plus green manure. That’s why the colorful version only shows up for a few weeks.

Catch It This Month

• 2026 dates: the Taichung International Flower Carpet Festival runs October 31 to November 22, 8:30am to 4:30pm daily.
• Where: the Seed Improvement and Propagation Station’s second nursery in Xinshe District, Taichung.
• Getting there: festival shuttle buses run from Fengyuan and Songzhu stations. Skip the car, because the mountain roads fill up fast on weekends.
• Pro tip: go early on a weekday. The light’s softer, and you’ll have more cosmos than crowds.

Make a weekend of it with our Taichung guide, or see what else is blooming in our month-by-month Taiwan travel guide. 🌸

Love Taiwan in bloom? Take some flowers home with our Plum Blossom and Formosa Lily Watercolor Notebook. Or browse Taiwan Merch and carry a little Formosa with you.