Buy Tulip Bulbs From Keukenhof – Tulip bulbs planted by my mom surrounded our suburban Midwestern home with cheery blooms each spring. Seeing the waxy green leaves forcing their way up through the hard brown dirt (sometimes still covered in snow) is forever etched in my memory. It wasn’t the tulips of the Keukenhof Gardens, but it brought us both joy.
The perennial with cup-shaped petals is still my favorite flower. Unfortunately, tulips are nearly impossible to grow in Central Texas where I now live.
Buy Tulip Bulbs From Keukenhof
That’s why the Netherlands jumped to the top of my travel list last spring when KLM airlines added a new nonstop flight from Austin to Amsterdam. My Number 1 must-see: Keukenhof Holland, widely regarded as the most beautiful spring garden in the world.
Spring In The Netherlands】keukenhof Garden Where Tulips Are In Full Bloom
Vibrant tulips pop up all over the Netherlands as warm weather warms the low country’s fertile sandy soil each spring. The best place to appreciate the beauty and variety of this esteemed flower is Keukenhof, an English landscape garden in Lisse, about 30 miles south of Amsterdam.
, the bulb-growing region of Holland, Keukenhof Gardens Tulips are visible for only eight weeks each spring. The floral extravaganza kicked off its 74
Season in March 2023 and is expected to attract more than one million visitors from around the world before closing on May 14.
When I arrived at Keukenhof Gardens on a cool, but sunny day in April 2022, I felt like a child let loose in a toy store. Waves of tulips in a kaleidoscope of colors, from metallic pink to eggplant purple, canary yellow and everything in between covered more than 80 acres of rolling green hills.
Everything You Need To Know About Visiting Keukenhof In 2024 • Jessica Lynn Writes
Neat rows of tulips meandered along nearly 10 miles of walking paths in the gardens. Other tulips clustered in dramatic displays amid budding trees and flowering shrubs. Garden ponds and streams displayed a myriad of bright colors reflecting off the bulbs planted at the water’s edge. Flower beds completed 19
There were bicolor and tricolor tulips. Single and double tulips. Low growing and majestic tall tulips. Striped and spotted varieties. Tulips with egg-shaped petals and some whose petals were shaped like bowls. Some had fringed petals, while others displayed smoother petals like those of other members of the lily family.
Botanical gardens are usually on my itinerary when I travel with my boyfriend, but none of us have experienced one as magical or as vast as the beautifully manicured gardens, grounds and tulip meadows of Keukenhof Gardens.
Judging by the “oohs” and “aahs” of other visitors, we weren’t the only ones in awe of this international showcase put on by the Dutch floriculture industry.
Opening Keukenhof 2024
Every fall, a team of 40 gardeners plant seven million flower bulbs by hand. The flower date, color, bulb type and planting depth are carefully considered by the gardeners, so the park is in continuous bloom for eight weeks. Signs in each bed indicate the name of the plant, as well as the supplier.
Tulips are indeed the star of the show – more than half of the 1,600 different varieties of bulbous plants are tulips. Beds of hyacinths, daffodils and crocuses as well as flowering trees and shrubs are equally impressive companions.
Mass plantings can highlight a single plant or color, while other beds combine various bulb types and color palettes.
The look of Keukenhof changes every year, as floral designers from hundreds of Dutch growers reflect on recent gardening trends. Many flowers also welcome visitors to the garden’s three pavilions. These structures feature cut flower arrangements and plant displays that change weekly. The pavilions also contain restaurants and gift shops stocked with bulbs and other floral items.
Visit Keukenhof Gardens. Everything You Need To Know –
I was particularly impressed by the Julian Pavilion, whose educational displays tell the story of tulips. Although many people assume that these flowers originated in the Netherlands, they were actually discovered growing wild in Central Asia. First cultivated in what is now Turkey as early as 1055, tulips were introduced to Europe and quickly became a prized possession of the 16th century.
The delicate flower was so adored in the Netherlands that tulips often appeared in paintings by the Dutch masters, including Rembrandt. They also sparked what is known as “tulip mania,” when a single bulb competed with the price of a canal house until the market collapsed.
Much like windmills and wooden shoes, tulips are synonymous with Holland and admired around the world. Today, two-thirds of the world’s flowers come from the Netherlands, which exports more than two billion flowers each year, according to holland.com, the country’s tourism website. The industry also drives tourism, as flower enthusiasts flock to the Netherlands.
Keukenhof, which means “kitchen garden” in Dutch, is part of the Keukenhof Estate covering 600 acres and includes a castle built in 1641 by a wealthy merchant from Amsterdam. The foundation of Keukenhof Holland is the estate’s English landscape garden designed in 1857.
Things You Should Know Before You Visit Keukenhof Tulip Garden
Leading flower bulb growers and exporters decided to use the estate to exhibit spring flowering bulbs in the 1940s. Opened to the public in 1950, the garden drew 236,000 visitors. Flower lovers have returned every spring, except in 2020 and 2021, when Keukenhof closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In spring 2023, international visitors returned in full force to see the tulips of the Keukenhof Gardens according to Jeroen Duyster, director of Keukenhof. In response, the garden has added timed entry tickets and is limiting the number of daily tickets issued to reduce the expected crowding.
Keukenhof was already full of flower lovers when we arrived well before 10am on a weekday, as recommended. The crowds thinned out as people moved further away from the main entrance. But crowded buses continued to unload visitors throughout the day.
Since we were staying in Amsterdam, we purchased tickets in advance that included return bus transportation from the city’s Europaplein metro station, which is about a 30-minute ride.
Dreams Can Come True At The Keukenhof Bulb Garden!
After visiting the garden, we jumped on lubicycles and grabbed a map so we could explore the massive bulb fields around Keukenhof. Electric boats can also take visitors on rides through narrow canals separating the tulip fields.
We pedaled past seemingly endless acres of tulips and other bulbs in a wide variety of colors, stopping often to take photos and sometimes just to gaze in awe at the lush Dutch plantings. When we drove back to the garden to get on the bus to Amsterdam, I was exhausted, but enchanted.
If you go: Amsterdam offers much more than flowers to visitors, including the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh and Anne Frank House art museums.
If you’re staying in the city, consider purchasing an I Amsterdam city card to get easy access to most of the city’s world-class attractions. The cards cover city-wide transportation as well as canal cruises and bike rentals and discounts at some restaurants and nightlife options.
Breck’s Bulbs At Keukenhof Gardens
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You know those seed and flower catalogs you get in early spring from your local nursery? Imagine walking through one of them, with every flower coming to life and blooming around you. That is essentially the purpose of Keukenhof: a showroom for the Dutch bulb industry.
This Dutch tulip garden is a real catalog in which hundreds of florists are invited to show the beauty and variety of their crop.
Keukenhof Gardens In Holland
If you want to know my opinion on buying Keukenhof tulips and bringing them back to the US, I address this question at the end of this article.
To make the most of this trip, here are some things you should know before you visit the Keukenhof tulip garden in the Netherlands.
+ Keukenhof Tulip Garden no longer accepts cash! This includes eateries, souvenir shops inside the garden and even the ice cream trucks or sandwich stands. So make sure you bring a credit or debit card with you for any purchase.
+ Get there at opening time, unless your idea of fun is rubbing elbows with a thousand people on any park alley.
Tulip ‘fly Away’ Bulbs — Buy Online At Farmer Gracy Uk
The park opens at 8am, so getting there before 9am will allow you to walk in relative peace and quiet for a few hours. By noon, the gardens become quite crowded, but the swarms disperse again around closing time, which is 7:30 p.m. So if you can’t get there early enough in the day, another good window is between 3pm and 6am.
+ If you come directly from the airport (there is a direct bus from Schiphol Airport), there are lockers where you can store your small luggage for free. The
