Free to collect: 5,000 hydrangeas! But you had to have something to do with that. It was Saturday morning traffic jams in Hoogerheide. Due to the increased energy prices, nursery Meewisse stops selling hydrangeas and so all plants had to go for good.
In the parking lot, two laughing women load a Fiat Panda. “We brought plants for the entire street. We live at the back of the polder with seven houses. So we have a plant for everyone,” says one of them. Their car is bulging. Both the back seat and the trunk are full. “But you can still drive. We have mirrors, don’t we!”
Expensive time
Further on, a woman walks out with a plant in each hand. “It’s for nothing! And that in these expensive times. You have to take advantage of that, right?!” It is a coming and going of people. “It started at nine o’clock, but if you already see what’s already gone here!”
“When you see your company go to hell like that. That’s really bad,” she responds. “But today people also come to get plants that they normally wouldn’t be able to afford. One thing outweighs the other.”
Gas price tenfold
Yet owner Antoon Meewisse experiences it as a beautiful day. “It is of course a mixed feeling. But it has been nice once. We were already planning it, but with this energy crisis we could no longer ignore it.”
Suppose Anton continued as a hydrangea grower, he would have lost about 75,000 euros on gas in January. “The gas price has increased tenfold. Last year it was still 7500 euros.”
“I expected this crowds, yes!” laughs a girl who drove from Bergen op Zoom to Hoogerheide with her mother. They take ‘only’ five hydrangeas with them. Humble, looking at all the fully loaded cars and trailers in the parking lot. “It’s a nice decoration for our garden,” says the mother.
End of an era
For twenty years the life of Antoon and his wife Bernadette was dominated by hydrangeas. Saturday at the end of the morning, more than half of 5,000 plants have already been collected. Saturday evening the couple is left with an empty greenhouse.
“We will then conclude a period of flower cultivation”, says a sober Antoon. “First we were in the roses, then in the hydrangeas. We are now switching to vegetable gardens for private individuals. We are taking a new path, that is part of doing business.”