Bouquets with Benefits in the Netherlands
Pick-Your-Own Bouquet
Plants around here are just starting their slow, groggy awakening. Tiny green tips of daffodil leaves are poking through the duff. Crocus, winter aconite and snowdrops are blooming. Buds on red maples are swelling and new signs of the next season can be found each day. This has me thinking again of the trip to Holland and Belgium we took last Spring. Small colorful flowers coupled with the recent passing of Valentine’s Day has me remembering a small tulip farm having an incredible influence on the community.
Annemiekes Pluktuin is a small tulip farm located in Hillegom, Netherlands (a town that once hosted the Beatles as they recorded a television show and features a Henry Ford Museum). Hillegom is in the western Netherlands and is part of the “Dune and Bulb Region (Duin- en Bollenstreek)” of the country. This area boasts coastal dunes and is where many of the flower bulbs the Netherlands are so famous for are cultivated. So it makes sense that Annemieke has her bulb farm here.
Each season the bulbs in the Pick-Your-Own fields are changed.
She and her husband guided us through her facility and tulip fields. They began the garden in 2009 after noting a lack of picking gardens in the area once so famous for its tulip cultivation (many of the tulip fields have given way to development in the region). Pluktuins are “Picking Gardens”, places where a visitor can go and pick their own bouquets of flowers. There are many around the country, catering to the tourism industry as well as residents looking for cut flowers for their homes. While the idea of a picking garden in Holland is not unique, certainly you can find them dotting the country, Annemieke’s is special.
HORT travels 