In addition to hyacinths and crocuses, the garden’s showpieces – the tulips – are also blooming.
“We now want to tell the visitor the story of the Hortus and the tulip,” explains volunteer Thea Stet of the Hortus Bulborum. They had new information boards and a map made for this purpose. This will slowly but surely make the garden look more like a museum.
1,700 varieties of tulips
No fewer than 2,700 different types of tulips are planned in the garden. Visitors can view, buy, adopt or even use them for their genes.
The latter especially applies to the ‘Duc van Tol.’ This is the first tulip variety that arrived in the Netherlands from Turkey via Austria around 1595. Centuries later, this species still exists. According to Stet, it has very strong genes, which growers like to use to generate new varieties of tulips.
Tulip mania at Thea
You can rightly say that tulip mania has struck the volunteer. “People often think: ‘Oh, she’s talking about the Hortus again,’ but it’s just such a fun story to tell,” she jokes.
Stet herself grew up in Limmen, where she worked for years at a transport company that almost exclusively transported bulbs in the summer. She also worked in the bulb gardens for six holidays. “It was a bulb village, right? There were no fewer than six companies in the area, but now there is none left.”
