Tulip Garden Near Amsterdam – Located in Lisse, Keukenhof is a seasonal garden that is home to millions of the most original Dutch flower: the tulip. The scenery is fantastic, and it’s only 40 km from Amsterdam, making it an easy day trip from the city. During a recent trip to the Netherlands, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit Keukenhof, and below is a summary of our time at the garden, including how we got there and what we did while there.
After a quick breakfast of oatmeal in the hotel room, we left more than intended at 10:15 for Keukenhof. We have booked time tickets with entry from 11:30 to 12:00, so we know that we have to hustle if we make a reservation. With this in mind, we chose to take the metro to Centraal Station instead of walking, which had been our original plan. Once at Centraal, we bought a roundtrip train ticket to Schiphol Airport from one of the self-service kiosks located near the station entrance.
Tulip Garden Near Amsterdam
Unfortunately, Lady Luck did not look down on us, because when we arrived at the train platform, we saw that we had missed the train to Schiphol and had to wait 20 minutes for the next one. This delay meant that when we arrived at Schiphol, we had just over 30 minutes to Keukenhof before we missed our reservation. We had planned to buy tickets at the airport for bus 858 to Keukenhof, but with so little time, this was no longer an option. So we reluctantly hailed an Uber and paid €38 for the 20-minute ride to Keukenhof. We arrived at Kebon with a whopping four minutes to spare.
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If you are reading this post and planning a trip to Keukenhof, learn from your mistakes and allow more time for your trip to the gardens. I also recommend looking for combi tickets; it includes both admission to Keukenhof and transportation to and from the Gardens by bus.
Upon entering Keukenhof, we were immediately greeted by a display of colorful tulips, and as beautiful as it was, it was a prelude to what was to come. We passed through several beautiful gardens filled with artistically arranged fountains, statues, and flowers before reaching the first visitor center, called the Juliana/Tulpomania building. There we grabbed some much needed coffee, as well as blueberry muffins to hold us over until lunch.
We spent the next hour exploring breathtaking garden after garden (and taking an obscene number of photos) when we went to the Wilhelmina building for lunch. Accustomed to the rather lackluster nature of visitor centers in America, I was caught off guard by how nice this was. It’s clean, spacious, and features a variety of food options, including some vegetarian. I settled on the quinoa salad and found it to be quite good.
Sated, we continued our exploration of the garden. It had started to rain when we had lunch, but luckily, we had checked the morning forecast and brought umbrellas. In that shelter, we continued to wander around the garden for the next few hours.
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Eventually, the rain stopped, and we grabbed a mid-afternoon snack of hand-cut, Belgian fries from a food truck. The fries were as tasty as they looked, and it didn’t take us long to scarf them down.
We saw a few more gardens, as well as a commercial tulip field next door, before leaving Keukenhof. We also went into one of the gift shops to buy some souvenirs to take home to our families.
Since we weren’t racing against the clock like that morning, we were able to take the bus back to Amsterdam, which saved us a lot of money. Since we had bought a return ticket to Amsterdam Centraal from Schiphol Airport earlier in the day, we took bus 858 to Schiphol. We arrived at Schiphol about 30 minutes after leaving Keukenhof.
Useful tidbit – The bus stop at Keukenhof is to the right of the main entrance (exit through the main entrance, turn right, and walk until you see a queue of people and signs for the various buses). If you don’t have a bus ticket yet (that is, you didn’t buy a combi ticket), you can buy a ticket at the bus stop via the QR code, which you need to do.
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Once at Schiphol, we checked in and went to the train platform. There, we took the train to Centraal Station, and from Centraal, we hopped on the subway one stop to get to the hotel.
By the time we got back to the hotel, it was a little past 17:00; almost seven hours have passed since we left the day we saw the tulips. Despite the crowds at Keukenhof, I still really enjoyed my time there and would heartily recommend it to anyone visiting the Netherlands during spring.
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Tulip Festival Amsterdam
It’s hard to believe that the coveted, glittering bulbs of Amsterdam once cost a decent house in 1636. Along with windmills, bikes, and canals, tulips are very central to the image of Amsterdam. April is the best time to enjoy these warm spring flowers, fresh colors that indicate the beginning and celebration of the end of winter. While tulips in the Netherlands are now a joy, it wasn’t always like that. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the tulip craze caused unrest among early Dutch merchants. We will examine how careless planting led to vandalism and bankruptcy, but first we must travel west to the Ottoman Empire to understand the origins of tulips.
According to our historian in Amsterdam, Alette Fleischer, the tulip originated in the mountains of what is now Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Mountainous areas tend to be more isolated, so how do you get to the Netherlands? Nomadic tribes carried the bulbs and seeds throughout the region, their beauty eventually attracting the attention of the Ottoman Empire. Tulips were a prized commodity for the Ottomans, as were the Dutch. From fashion to art, fragrant flowers touched every part of Ottoman culture. In fact, sultans used to wear tulip turbans, hence the name of the tuber.
In the 16th century, Dutch ambassador Olgier Gisleen van Busbeke visited Sultan Suleiman the Great. Before looking at the delicate petals, the ambassador went to the Sultan’s turban and asked why. The Sultan, thinking that van Busbeke was asking about a turban, replied that it was a “tulipani”, or “turban” in Ottoman Turkish. Since then, the name tulip stuck to this beautiful flower.
In love with tulips from the beginning, the Flemish diplomat Olgier Gisleen van Busbeke took the seeds from the Ottomans and brought them back to Holland and they would change the image of Amsterdam and the Netherlands forever. Olgier gave the seeds to a botanist named Carolus Clusius and planted them in Hortus Botanicus Leiden, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world (founded in 1587). It takes seven years for a tulip to bloom and when it does, the Dutch take notice. Tulips are so beautiful that the early gardeners who populated the city with these colorful bulbs were vandals who stole flowers from the botanical garden! Over time, honey-scented bulbs became very fashionable and the tulip industry grew, especially during the period of economic and colonial success that Holland was most famous for.
Netherlands Tulip Fields 2024
You may be familiar with the term tulipmania. It refers to the economic phenomenon when the price of goods rises higher than their value. In the 17th century, the Dutch experienced an increase in wealth from trade through the Dutch East India Company. The upper class had money to spend on luxury items, and tulips were their favorite luxury item. From 1636 to 1637, the price of tulips rose to 12 times their normal value and then fell sharply. As a result, even rich merchants failed to pay tulip guilders.
While the original tulipmania led to strained relations between buyers and sellers, the common belief that the Dutch economy suffered an economic collapse because of the plant is not true. The show is very satirical, the Dutch make fun of themselves over funny and weird things
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