Holland in the springtime provides visitors with a fabulous automobile drive along 100 miles of roadways lined with fields of blooming bulbs which include colorful tulips, hyacinths, and narcissus that literally fling their fragrances into the air.
At first glance, the impression is that the sky, at sunset, has settled all over the Dutch landscape.
Each variety of tulip is planted separately in a huge block so that driving through miles of giant tulip checkerboards of pink, white, yellow, lavender, and scarlet is an unforgettable memory.
Equally eye-delighting are the golden fields of narcissus and the flag-like living stripes of hyacinths in pink (Marconi), white (L’Innocence), and blue (King of the Blues).
Outstanding, to me, as I drove along, was the grandeur of a bed of purple hyacinths, the size of a city block, with a chaperoning windmill beside it.
Annual Spring Exposition
The annual spring exposition of tulips, hyacinths, and narcissus at Keukenhof is a bulb gardener’s dream of paradise coming to earth.
Located between Haarlem and The Hague, at Lisse, this great, one-time hunting preserve of royalty has been converted from grassy woodlands into the superb spring bulb garden in all of Holland.
On one Sunday during my trip, I saw more than 300,000 visitors from all parts of Europe meandering through Keukenhors eight miles of walkways.
Dressed in the costumes of their native lands, these appreciative souls were quietly, and almost breathlessly, admiring the 10 million or more radiant tulips, fragrant hyacinths, and sun-gilt narcissus flourishing amid the green grasses and beneath the graceful white-barked birches.
Keukenhof National Flower Show
Actually, the Keukenhof National Flower Show, put on by some 70 Holland bulb growers, is an outdoor exposition of all that is finest and newest and most glamorous in the world of spring’s flowering bulbs.
Some of the beds contain as many as 10,000 tulips of a single variety. In the glasshouses, 750 different kinds of tulips are planted.
During the tulip festival, Hollanders decorate their front lawns with mosaics of flower petals using patterns such as ships, maps, people, flowers, flags, animals, and geometric designs.
A life-size, standing statuary made of fresh tulip petals and stemless tulip blossoms is sometimes seen.
Automobiles, bicycles and bicyclists, streets, and strolling pedestrians are garlanded with handsome necklaces of tulip blossoms, while majestic floats made of tulips and hyacinths are on parade.
Decapitating Tulip Blooms
Growing in unique seashore sand that is found at Lisse and Hillegom and which is but amply enriched with Holstein cow manure, the fields of tulips are allowed to flower only a few days for the delight of tourists.
Then they are ruthlessly decapitated. The Dutch grow their tulips not for blossoms but for fat, marketable bulbs, which they export around the world from San Francisco to Tokyo.
In decapitating the tulip blooms, it is noticeable that the older generations of tulip-field workers cut off the stems directly under the flower with a knife. The younger generation, on the other hand, breaks off the stems.
Blossoms are thrown into immense wicker baskets, which are emptied into nearby canal barges and floated away as rainbow refuse.
Cutting Off Tulip Blossoms
Cutting off the tulip blossoms accomplishes two things.
In the first place, it does not allow the tulip to waste its energy in seed production.
Secondly, if the tulip petals should fall on the foliage and stem, a virus or disease can develop that may ruin the bulbs.
While the tulip is in growth and flower, the bulb becomes emaciated and faded in appearance, but as the foliage and stein die and dry, the juices go back down into the bulb and fatten it.
Upon asking one tulip grower why the Dutch do not cut off the tulip buds before flowering and thereby save all the energy that would go into flowering, I was informed that if tulip buds are cut off once or twice before blooming, the bulbs may become frustrated and never make buds again.
Surprisingly enough, none of these bulbs require watering. Holland’s canals supply a constant water source about two feet below the earth’s surface.
Even in the bulb growers’ great, movable exhibition glasshouses in their fields, herculean-sized tulips are grown on the field-sand floor without heat.
Specimen blooms like the mammoth tulip Charon attain the almost unbelievable height of 55″ inches, with cantaloupe-sized blooms of gorgeous crimson, without watering.
Here one can really see staring mid takes time to compare. After eight separate visits to Keukenhof, I received the following opinions regarding varieties.
Opinions On Different Tulip Varieties
Holland’s Glory is “tops” in fiery, orange-scarlet tulips. Lefeher’s Favorite is the superb red dazzler, and Van Dyck is the pink parrot tulip stunner.
Duke of Wellington is the most superlative and gracefully formed of the white varieties. Aristocrat is as stately as a patrician woman of Greece dressed in a rosy orchid.
Sweet Harmony, with its lemon-yellow petals, widely edged with white, is as refreshing in appearance as pineapple sherbet tastes.
Princeps has an orange glitter that practically outshines the sun and delightfully hurts your eyes.
Chappaqua is the most thrilling silvery-pink and Notre Dame the most wonderful tall cerise, while Mark Anthony is a truly-fine dark wine.
Sunkist is the very pinnacle in tulip gold. Shell-pink Eros, the red Rocket, and the white Mount Tacoma are the wonders of the peony-flowered class.
Zomersehoon, although reputed to be a variety over 300 years old, is as youthful as spring and as charming as a debutante in its exquisite pink with ivory and cream stripes. Mentally, you tip your hat to Zomersehoon!
General San Martin
A new and immense, blood-red parrot tulip, General San Martin, has been produced through X-ray treatments, secretly administered to a bulb of the parrot tulip Red Champion by Holland’s renowned scientist. Dr. Willem E. de Mol, in Amsterdam.
The bloom of General San Martin is twice the size and weight volume of Red Champion and much stronger. It is a delightful, slightly-deeper shade of red.
About 300 bulbs of General San Martin have been grown, and Hollanders predict that it will be the Father Adam of a new race of sturdy and extraordinary-sized tulips.
Darwin Tulip Utopia
By secretly bombarding a bulb of the cardinal-red Darwin tulip Utopia with neutrons of atomic energy, Dr. de Mol has enlarged its bloom and petals and changed it from an egg-shape to an open chalice of handsome nobility which is named Irene Joliot-Curie — the first “atomic tulip.”
In the old days, the Dutch master painters Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Frans Hals sent Dutch beauty out into the world on canvas, but today’s Dutch master tulip growers are sending Dutch beauty out into the world in the form of tulips — or rather “Wiper’,” as the Hollander spells it!
44659 by John S. Van Gilder