Spring, spring, spring! It's the most beautiful and inconsistent season of the year.
And it's my first time enjoying it in the land of tulips:
The Netherlands.
The tulips attract thousands of tourists every year -- thanks in part to Instagram
and other platforms. Flower selfies are hugely popular after all.
But is all the hype really worth the trip?
I'm in Bollenstreek, which means bulb growing region,
about 30 minutes from Amsterdam.
It's one of the most visited areas in the entire country during spring time.
I'm going to visit two of the best places to see tulips here.
Let's check out what you can expect to see here!
I begin at Keukenhof, a global hotspot for tulip fans.
The entrance fee is 19 euros.
Oh wow, it smells incredibly good here.
This is the largest tulip garden in the Netherlands.
There are more than 7 million tulips, but also daffodils, hyacinths and other bulb flowers.
All were planted by hand.
Patrick van Dijk is waiting for me. He has been working at Keukenhof since 2019.
It's a really nice office that you have here.
It's the best office in the world!
So normally tulips have 2 weeks of blooming.
But you have here a technique, which is quite cool. Tell us about it.
This technique is called lasagna-planting.
And like you said, there is only two weeks
of blooming. So we created lasagna-planting so we can
get 6 weeks of blooming.
As you can see here at the bottom the late bloomers, in the middle the mid-bloomers
and at the top the early bloomers. So these will grow for 2 weeks, these will grow for 2 weeks
and these will grow for 2 weeks.
Keukenhof has a long history. It started in 1949 with just a few gardeners.
Today, hundreds of exhibitors show off their best flowers.
The park opens every year from March until May.
What comes after plantation? What are the challenges to maintain such a huge garden?
The biggest challenge is to keep 32 hectares of park.
One of the things is keeping the grass at a certain height
They cut it once a week. And actually after the park is closed,
we get the other challenge: Keeping it watered. Keeping the trees alive.
And we don't have any irrigation system, it's all done by hand.
Oh wow! So, when it rains: you guys are lucky!
We have the evening off. Yeah.
In 2022, more than 1 million visitors came to Keukenhof!
This is crazy, totally crowded.
I lost my cameraman!
My tip: stay away from the main routes to avoid the crowds.
And don't visit on weekends!
Tulips have been cultivated in the Netherlands
for hundreds of years though they're actually of Asian origin.
So how come the Netherlands became the first producer of tulips?
Is the weather here perfect for those flowers?
The weather is perfect but also the ground
is perfect for raising.
The ground is sandy and hydrating. And that is necessary for a good culture of tulip bulbs.
So one of those tulips costed the same price of a fancy house in the Netherlands
hundreds years ago.
Yes, hundreds of years ago. Yes, that's true, it happened. The tulip went very popular and
people wanted to have a tulip in their garden.
As a sign of wealthiness, of richness and importance.
And everything else was very rare.
And prices raised enormously. For instance, at the end
one tulip costed about 2,000 euros a piece.
Oh wow, only one?
Only one. And now only 2 cents a piece.
We called that period the Tulipmania.
We are now at the second location, which is a less crowded alternative for people who
want to walk around tulips, take pictures and, why not? Selfies!
The Tulip Barn was created by Lian Ruigrok and her daughter Romy Ruigrok in 2021.
There are about 500.000 tulips and over 175 different varieties to enjoy!
This place is also very instagrammable!
Plus: you're actually allowed INSIDE the fields! The entrance fee is 7,50 euros.
The Tulip Barn is not a traditional tulip field.
So how did you come up with this idea?
The campaign started a couple years ago
to create awareness for tourists that they can not step into
any tulip field, because it's for the production of tulips and not for taking pictures.
So we wanted to create an alternative for people, where they can take pictures
without doing any harm to the fields.
For example, a normal tulip field has very straight paths, or very narrow paths,
where only a tractor can drive through.
And here we made the paths a little wider, so people can walk through
and most of the tulips stay unharmed.
So many colors – it's beautiful!
And: it's much easier to enjoy all the flowers because it's not so crowded!
If you love selfies, then this is the place to be!
So, working with flowers depends on nature and also on the weather.
How do you make sure that your garden here blooms all season long?
Yeah, it does actually. So we pre-cool part of our tulip bulbs that we plant here.
So then the tulips think that they've had a longer winter
and that spring has come 1 or 2 weeks earlier.
So they start blooming a couple of days or weeks earlier
than they would do normally.
Nice.
So that is how we trick nature a little bit. So they can still be blooming all season.
What are the challenges of working here?
Our challenges are the weather. Last year we had snow in April.
Our tulips didn't really like that. But this summer should be fine.
So that's great.
Oh, what else we had this year. We had these ducks and they started eating our bulbs.
So in some places here you'll see maybe like a meter of tulips
that didn't come up.
Yeah, that happens because of ducklings started to eat our bulbs.
Time for a last selfie.
Well, after a long and really colorful day
I have to admit, that spring in the Netherlands is quite a sight!
I'm pretty sure I'm coming back here again!