The Netherlands in Spring: Keukenhof and Tulip Barn – is the Tulip Hype Worth the Trip?

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 the 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 Bulle Strijk, which means bulb-growing region, about 30 minutes from Amsterdam. It's one of the most visited areas in the entire country during springtime. I'm going to visit two of the best places to see tulips here. Let's check it 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 two weeks of blooming, but you have here a technique which is quite cool. Tell us about it. Yeah, this technique is called lasagna planting. And like you said, there's only two weeks of blooming. So we created lasagna planting so we can get six weeks of blooming. As you can see at the bottom, the late bloomers, middle the mid bloomers and top the early bloomers. So these will grow for two weeks, these will grow for two weeks and these will grow for two 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 acres of park. One of the things is keeping the grass at a certain height and they cut it once a week. And actually after the park is closed, we get the other challenge, keeping it water, keeping the trees alive. And we don't have an irrigation system. It's all done by hand. Oh wow. So when it rains, you guys are lucky. Yeah, we got the evening off. In 2022, more than one 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, but they are 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 them. The ground is sandy and hydrating and that is necessary for a good culture of tulip bulbs. So one of those tulips cost the same price of a fancy house in the Netherlands 100 years ago. Yeah, 100 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 as everything was very rare, the prices raised enormously. For instance, at the end, one tulip costed about 2000 euro a piece. Oh wow, only one? Only one and now only two cents a piece. We call that period the two pomania. 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 Regroog and her daughter Romy Regrood in 2021. There are about 500,000 tulips and over 175 different types to enjoy. This place is also very Instagrammable. Plus, you are actually allowed inside the fields. The entrance fee is 7 euros and 50 cents. The Tulip Barn is not a traditional tulip field. So how did you come up with this idea? Well, the campaign started a couple years ago to create awareness for tourists that they cannot stop 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. 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 the season long? Yeah, it does actually. So we pre-cool part of our tulip bulbs that we plant here. So then the tulips think they've had a longer winter and the spring has come one or two weeks earlier. So it will start blooming a couple days or weeks earlier than it would normally. Nice. That's how we trick nature a little bit so they can stay blooming all season. Yeah. What are the challenges of working here? Our challenges are the weather. Last year we had snow in April. Well, our tulips didn't really like that, but they somehow survived. So that's great. Oh, what else we had this year? We have those kind of ducks and they started eating our bulbs. So in some places here you will see maybe like a meter of tulips that didn't come up. And that happened because the ducklings started to eat our bulbs. Time for our 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.