The World’s Biggest Tulip Give-Away
March 6th, 2018
If you’re growing tulips in your yard, odds are the bulbs originated in the Netherlands, that tiny European country that supplies the world with about 1.7 billion tulip bulbs every year.
People pick out their free tulips on Dam Square during Amsterdam’s 2018 National Tulip Day.
One of the world’s most impressive horticultural sights is in spring in the Dutch rural tulip-growing regions, where carpet-like rows of blooming tulips roll out for acres and acres like we grow corn and soybeans.
I’ve been there twice in that time frame and can tell you that tulip fields are a lot more eye-grabbing than soybean fields.
Even more impressive is the Dutch public garden called Keukenhof, which is 79 gorgeous acres filled with 7 million spring-flowering bulbs. It’s only open during spring, so the whole place is packed with bulbs for maximum impact in those few months.
This year, while visiting my new granddaughter in Amsterdam, I happened to be there on the third Saturday of January, which is the day of an annual Dutch occasion called “Nationale Tulpendag,” or National Tulip Day.
The highlight is when Dutch bulb-growers join forces to plant a “picking garden” of 200,000 tulips in Dam Square in the heart of Amsterdam.
These are tulips forced into bloom in greenhouses and set out in wide blocks of trays. They’re not planted in soil but packed tightly together with the bulbs intact and roots intertwined. In other words, they’re live plants, and suitable for planting.
The best part is that people get to come in and pick a bag of 15 free tulips.
And pick they do. Some 15,000 people line up to take advantage of the offer, which is an excellent way to brighten a typically cloudy, chilly Dutch January day.
We waited in line for 45 minutes to pick our share of blooming tulips, which I planted in my daughter’s postage-stamp Amsterdam backyard for instant color.
Forced bulbs like this usually don’t come back to bloom very well in ensuing years, but the freebie tulips are great for giving a preview to the real show in April and May. They’ll bloom from this regimen for at least three or four few weeks.
I noticed that bulbs hold their bloom a lot longer in the steadily cool Dutch spring (day after day of 40s and 50s). What shortens the bloom for us is when an early warmup brings out the color too soon, then a sudden drop browns out the flower perimeters or droops the blossoms. Or worse yet, the weather will turn too hot and sunny soon after the bulbs open, forcing them to speed up their progression into seed-maturing.
When I got to Amsterdam in mid-January, planted daffodils were already up and blooming in a bed along my daughter’s street. They were still blooming when I left three weeks later.
Maybe our spring will be a gradual one this year and give us a long and beautiful display of bulbs. That’s assuming you remembered to plant them in falls past… and don’t have a yard that’s “under-bulbed.”
Read George’s past post on why we American gardeners are under-bulbed.