Keukenhof

For eight weeks each spring, a 32-hectare park near Lisse turns into one of the largest flower displays anywhere. Around seven million bulbs, planted by hand between October and early December by a team of about forty gardeners, come into bloom in succession from mid-March to mid-May, with the tulips usually at their peak around mid-April. The planting is composed like painting rather than arranged like a collection: rivers of a single colour run beneath old trees and along the edges of ponds, and beds are layered so that one variety takes over as another fades. Because the whole scheme is dug up and replanted every year, no two seasons look quite the same.

The ground has a long past. In the fifteenth century it belonged to the hunting grounds of Countess Jacoba of Bavaria, and its herb and vegetable plots supplied her castle kitchen, which is what the name Keukenhof, "kitchen garden", recalls. In 1641 a country house was built on the estate, and in 1857 its owners, the Van Pallandt family, brought in the landscape architects Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher, whose English-style layout of winding paths, water and mature trees still frames the flowers. The flower show itself came much later: in 1949 a consortium of bulb growers and exporters turned the grounds into a showcase for their trade, and it opened to the public in 1950 to immediate success.

That origin still shapes the place. Some hundred bulb companies and growers show their varieties here, so the garden is at once a work of design and a living catalogue of Dutch horticulture, and the pavilions add changing indoor displays of cut flowers to the open-air beds. Around the park the flat country between Haarlem and Leiden is itself bulb-growing land, and in flowering time the landscape beyond the fences continues the spectacle on a working scale. The season now draws well over a million visitors, so the first hours after opening are the calmest time to walk the paths.

Getting there

Keukenhof lies on the edge of Lisse in South Holland, about 1 km from the town centre. The nearest airport is Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS), roughly 15 km away. During the season buses run to the park from Schiphol and from the railway stations of Haarlem and Leiden. The garden opens only in spring; for 2027 the season runs from 18 March to 9 May, daily from 8:00 to 19:00.