Ian and I have spent some time in Amsterdam and checked out many of the wonderful sights and experiences available to the avid tourist. It’s a lovely city and we enjoyed our time there, (well maybe me more than Ian as he was attending a trade show for most of it). The thing that drew us back this time was the stunning display of bulbs that burst forth every spring. Exactly when in spring is not an exact science. The bulbs require certain temperatures to germinate, grow and flower and the temperature of the air and ground has a lot to do with it. Just when peak flowering time is will change from year to year and last year’s timing is not the way to make a prognosis for the following year.
I subscribed to an email newsletter that told me each week about the flowers’ progress. In the end though, you still need to make a calculated guess and so we locked in the weekend of the 21st/22nd April and then crossed our fingers that the forecast thunderstorm would not fry us on our bicycles in the flat Dutch landscape.
We arrived in the evening and went into the city for a meal and a wander. Amsterdam is a very popular destination for “hens” and “bucks’ and so large swathes of the city are full of gaggles of mates ‘avin’ a larf. Still it’s all good fun (‘til someone falls into a canal and drowns!) Marijuana is legal in the Netherlands and the air is thick with the smell of joints. It makes for a pretty chilled vibe though and it must be good for business at the late night eateries.
We chose accommodation near the airport for easy access to the shuttle bus that takes you to the marvellous Keukenhof Gardens in Lisse. This is 32 hectares of botanical gardens dedicated to showcasing the Dutch floriculture sector with a special emphasis on bulbs. It is open for just eight weeks annually with a theme allotted each year. This year’s theme was Romance with Flowers. We arrived as early as possible on the first bus of the day and spent the morning being wowed by the marvellous massed displays of colour. The colours are so vibrant that you can easily imagine the whole vista as vast stripes of pigment-rich paints spread across the garden. The stripes and shapes are all beds of flowers however and they are planted in arresting arrays of single colour blocks or mixed complimentary colours. The effect is dazzling to say the least. The garden is cut through with many paths and at each junction your eyes are distracted by still more amazing beds of colour making navigation a permanent quandary; down there to the orange and yellow, over there to the purple and pink or straight on to the red? I wanted to be everywhere at once and I envied the bees’ ability to flit from place to place and their aerial views.
Our early start worked very well for us as the place was uncrowded and we could move about very happily for a few hours. Some delicious Dutch apple cake (complete with ‘slagroom’ or whipped cream to you and me) and coffee sustained us for more ‘oohing and ahhhing’. We got a stamp of a tulip (what else?) on our wrist and exited the park to join the inefficiency of a queue to exchange one piece of paper for another piece of paper so that we might join another queue to pick up our bicycles. In a canny bit of manoeuvring, Ian joined one queue and I joined the other and we made it to the head of each in perfect synchronicity. So we were literally ‘on our bikes’ and off into the countryside.
Surrounding the Keukenhof Gardens are vast fields of bulbs. The farmers in this region grow the flowers only for the bulb production. They sell them to trading companies who package and sell the bulbs to garden centres and retailers all over the world. This means that if you get your timing right you will witness fields of colour with the flowers fully bloomed and at their prettiest. Soon after this peak blooming time the farmers ‘head’ the plants which is to say they chop off the beautiful flowers. This allows the energy to return to the bulb and produce a larger and more robust bulb for harvesting. I was a bit confused because I didn’t know about bulb production. I had visions of the farmer buying a bulb, producing a flower, harvesting the bulb and selling it to the trader. So then next year he buys another bulb? Well this has a very obvious flaw. You have to buy a bulb to replace the one you just sold. A little investigation shows that this is not the unsustainable commercial cycle that I had initially imagined. By removing the flower at the right time and leaving the stem and leaves to wither, the plant redirects its energy back into the bulb which multiplies thus producing plenty of bulbs for sale and re-propagation. Any proper gardeners out there reading this will doubtless have known about this and consider me a right ignorant pillock but as my grandmother used to say “you learn something new every day.”
The fields were bursting with bulbs of every kind. There was the very obvious Dutch emblem tulips in every hue but also golden fields of daffodils and heady perfumed swathes of purple, mauve, pink and white hyacinths. The jonquils also scented the air in a way that was truly delightful. It was like passing the florist on the high street during spring but on a huge scale. I perched on my bike, closed my eyes and just drank in the fragrant air. All in all it was a very sensory experience with the sun and the breeze on our skin, the marvellous colours to see and the beautiful perfume to sniff appreciatively.
We cycled down to the North Sea where we ate friet met mayo and cooled off under an umbrella. Then across the dune areas and back through more flower fields, past a yard with two sheep and a lamb complete with a sheep dog keeping a watchful eye and another yard with several alpacas. We finished our 25 kilometre circuit back at the Gardens for another quick look around and a well-earned beer before we headed back to the airport. We gave ourselves a bit of leeway as we assumed we would queue for some time at the end of the day for the transfer but as we approached the end of the long line of people waiting, a fellow was asking for volunteers to stand on the coach that was ready to pull out. The trip is only about 30 minutes so we jumped aboard and saved a significant wait. Not that it was all that helpful as our plane departure was delayed by a good 45 minutes.
What a marvellous experience is tulip time in Holland. Sights on a grand scale often impress and this was definitely floral colour and heavenly scents in very large proportion. That thunderstorm never eventuated thank goodness. Who wants to be in a broad flat landscape when lightening is active? In the words of Daffy, ‘Not this little black duck!’