Just amazing! I cannot believe how excited I am about flowers!
Just to bring you up to speed we departed Antwerp last Wednesday and took the train via Breda to The Hague or Den Haag. Visiting the Keukenof Flower Garden was high on my agenda for this whole Western Europe adventure and where we spent our final day whilst based here.
The Gardens open at eight each morning and we were there by nine. The journey was quite simple, we took a train to Leiden and then caught the “Tulip” bus to the park. There were Keukenof representatives at the bus station in Leiden checking we had both park and bus tickets. You can travel into the park via other cities, just check their website.
We had no idea how much time we would spend but with an unlimited schedule we really didn’t care, it was my intention to absorb all it had to offer.
On arrival we picked up one of their maps and agreed a route. From the onset you are met with the most astounding displays of flowers, mainly tulips of course, but so many different colours and types. Despite a bit of a misty start to the morning, I felt like a child at Christmas, it was just so beautiful and I was madly clicking away with my mobile camera.
Beauty abounds at Keukenof, giving endless pleasure to the senses and exalting the mind and spirit. Everywhere you look there are various colour combinations:- bright purple and delicate baby pink, deep crimson with velvety pink, yellow with satsuma orange.
Sometimes they are displayed mixed together, whilst other beds have distinct colour blocks:- yellow then red then white. Sunburst orange followed by a cerise pink and then lipstick red.
Sometimes there is an added dimension where a consistent mix of colour is used:- pure purple tulips, purple but with white tips on each petal, delicate white tulips with just a hint of pink on the outside of the petals, this is reversed with pink petals with a hint of white and all around the perimeter of the bed are frilly tulips in bubblegum pink.
There are beds of mixed flowers :-beautiful “Sir Winston Churchill” narcissus with “Queen of the Night” deep dark tulips and Carnagie hyacinths exuding their fabulous Spring awakening perfume. Fritallia aurora with it’s downward facing orange flowers mixed with traditional light purple tulips.
I honestly never knew there were so many varieties of tulip. I love the cerise pink that look like someone has taken a very small fine feather boa and created paper flowers and their purple equivalent where the frilly tips are white like someone has drawn a line around the outside of each petal. There is a yellow version with splashed red on the outside petals but only on the right side of the flower?
Long beds of flowers line the walkway stretching from the indoor”Beatrix” display area downwards to the lake, beautiful cherry trees sprinkling their blossom on the green lawns interspersed with beds upon beds of different flowers of every colour.
Nature brings beauty in other formats too like the tiny droplets of dew still on some of the petals. Or the production of one single purple tulip amidst a border of red tulips, which makes me smile, as if nature is trying to tell us we cannot always produce the perfection we desire!
Finally beauty has been created with fountains, a wood enclosed waterfall, ponds full of fish lined within two perpendicular lines of conical firs interspersed with more traditional red and white beds of tulips. There is a small pond with an ornamental windmill at its centre and a child’s sailing boat made from a traditional Dutch clog and home made sail .
Imagination -someone has to form a mental image of the flowers, currently mere bulbs, and not present in reality and never before wholly perceived in reality, so they can be planted every Autumn. The visitors arrive each year to see a different layout every Spring. How does someone constantly create new beds in new arrangements with different combinations of colours?
Today, for example, they have used two, even three, height differences to draw your eyes towards a bed of tulips and daffodils.
Their imagination conjures the idea of giant Barbie pink flower pots with fletching trees set amongst a bed of short pink carnation type tulips and blue pops of colour from grape hyacinth.
They create swirls of blue grape hyacinths amongst equally irregular shaped beds of orange tulips. Then they take this idea even further and plant another curving river of coloured tulips but this time accentuated by the grape hyacinths on either side!
Flowers are planted in beds but also to complement nature amongst the trees.
My favourite area of this type is a river of grape hyacinths winding its way amongst some trees with a quick dash of yellow daffodils and pink tulips thrown in for colour. Who on earth dreams up these ideas?
Keukenof not only presents beauty and imagination it delivers inspiration.
A traditional bed of flowers is presented above a stone seat on which can be seen a statue of Buddha. On either side a wicker basket of Spring flowers complete the image. I could create that at home.
Another display shows what could be the side of your garden shed painted vivid yellow on which has been hung a series of antique looking glass mirrors with pale pink garden tiles beneath on which stand subtle pink flower pots of varying sizes, again all planted with daffodils, tulips and hyacinths. The mirrors reflect the bed of mixed red tulips which surround the shed at a discreet distance.
Horizontal flower pots with bright yellow daffodils, pink tulips and hyacinths have been secured onto solid garden trellis at two different heights to add colour to what would otherwise be a boring garden divide.
A wooden home made container painted bright pink creates a raised bed of Spring flowers out of which a small ladder like set of shelves reaches upwards to the sky. The shelves filled with a collection of teapots, teacups and a kettle It’s a bit out there for my garden at home but certainly different.
I left feeling mentally stimulated, wanting to take ideas home with me particularly from the orchid display in “Beatrix” and flower arrangements within the indoor Willem-Alexander building.
The idea that orchids can be clustered together in their pots and then placed within a larger planter had never occurred to me but it looks fabulous.
The flower arrangements cover all manner of events and ideas- a blue VW camper with pure white flowers spilling from the rear that you could create for a wedding, a Valentines display with red hearts and gorgeous pink lilies
Even the great outdoors is celebrated with a quirky caravan and accompanying painted old car. Another display features pink paper lanterns strewn above beds of flowers as if a birthday is about to be celebrated in the garden.
An old kitchen armoire has been painted blue, its doors invitingly open so you can see within on every shelf pots of coloured flowers.
My mind was aswim with how I could take everything I had learnt previously in Cordoba where preparations had been underway for the Patio Festival (see previous post) and combine it with the inspiring displays I had seen here.
Please if you ever get a chance to go to Keukenhof, go! It is honestly astounding!
NB:
This is our sixteenth city on our current tour of Western Europe. Why not catch up on where we have been already and then join us as we progress?
A Midlife Adventure 
The gardens there are stunning.
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