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Season 1 • Episode 8 - November 1, 2022
This week we sat down after
recovering from our jetlag to talk about our recent trip
to Holland and Belgium. We spent two weeks in
mid-September touring some great sites with over 20
Garden Time fans. We arrived in Amsterdam and headed to
the suburb of Haarlem. This area, like most in the
Netherlands, is full of history and we found a lot of it
in the city center where we stayed. We enjoyed a stroll
through the old town and along the historic canals. The
next day the tour really started with a trip to the
Aalsmeer Flower Auction. This huge building full of
flowers and blooms is the largest in the world. Here, an
amazing twenty million flowers from all over the world
are sold daily. In the morning we toured the facilities
to see where the auction takes place. Hundreds of
workers driving carts full of flowers moved around the
floor in a dance of plants and blooms as flowers
arrived, were sold and then departed to be sent to their
final destination: a florist or flower shop near you.
After the auction we traveled to the town of Aalsmeer
for a tour of the historic gardens where we learned
about how they reclaimed thousands of acres of land from
the sea. Included with that was a boat tour of the
growing facilities and how they force plants to bloom
for the cut flower market. All the dikes, dams, canals
and pumping have created hundreds of square miles of
land. They say that God created the world, but the Dutch
created Holland.
The next day we traveled to the Hague
and Delft to visit the Mauritshuis Museum. There we
marveled at masterpieces such as Vermeer's Girl with a
Pearl Earring and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes
Tulp by Rembrandt, and saw how they make Delft pottery.
Then we finished the day with a visit to the private
garden of Emely Hacker. We were greeted with tea and
Stroopwafels before exploring the gardens. Her gardens
sit below the level of the local dike, so she is below
the water level and she has filled her garden with tons
of plants divided by berms and hedges, creating little
garden rooms across her property.
Check
out her site here.
The next day found us traveling to
Antwerp, Belgium and on to historic Ghent. We stopped to
see the house, garden and studio of Peter Paul Rubens.
We also visited a local chocolate shop to pick up some
Belgian treats. The following morning we toured the old
town of charming Ghent and the afternoon was spent at
the Ghent University Botanical Garden. More than 10,000
different plant species in the tropical and subtropical
greenhouses of the University Botanical Garden are in
bloom and full of special plants. Ryan had a chat with
docent Goost Buyse to learn more about plants and their
relationship with humans. Goost told us about how the
garden helps create a link between the plant world and
the current world, and helps to save, propagate and
distribute plants to areas around the world.
Then we were on to Bruges a picture
perfect, pocket-sized medieval city. Laced with canals,
it was at one time, a great North European trading port.
Before we wandered through Bruges we were able to visit
the private gardens of Chris Ghyselen a local garden
designer and author, who has filled his garden with
various garden rooms and plants that reflect his designs
and techniques. He is a huge fan of Persicarias and his
garden is full of them. It was great to wander his
garden and see how gardeners in Belgium approach design
and plant selections.
September 13th found us at Kinderdijk.
Kinderdijk is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nineteen
beautiful windmills, built around 1740, stand here as
part of a larger water management system to prevent
floods. We were able to stop and tour the insides of the
windmills to see how they were used to control the water
and serve as homes too. Then it was off to the Botanical
Gardens of Leiden. The university also houses the Hortus
Botanicus of Leiden, founded in 1590, where the tulip
was introduced to Western Europe. One of Europe's first
botanic gardens, now part of the University of Leiden,
it is small and beautifully kept. There is also a
Japanese garden named after the scientist Philipp Franz
von Siebolt who carried out botanical research in Japan
during the 19th century. Part of the botanical garden is
a historical reconstruction of the very first version of
Leiden University botanical garden. There is also a
systematic garden named after the Swedish botanist Carl
Linnaeus. Judy had a chance to visit with Robbert
Fulmer, a docent and researcher, who led one of our tour
groups.
Then it was on to Amsterdam for the
final days of our tour. The following day found us at
the Rijksmuseum, the home of Rembrandt’s famous Night
Watch. The afternoon was free for people to explore and
some did a canal tour while others visited the Van Gogh
museum, the Anne Frank house or the Hortus Botanicus of
Amsterdam. The final day of the tour started with a
visit to a local farm where we learned about making
Gouda cheese and to see how they make wooden shoes. We
then stopped for a lunch at a local bistro that had its
own garden.
We wrapped up the tour with a stop at
the Floriade Garden Expo! This is Holland's
once-in-a-decade World's Fair of Horticulture. Set
across a vast, 150-acre site, more than 300 eco-homes
have been built as part of the show, with plans for the
area to be turned into a green residential neighborhood
of 660 homes once it’s finished. The theme was ‘2022:
Building, Creating and Designing the Green City of the
Future’
It was a great tour and one full of
great gardens and lots of other attractions that kept
our group on the move and fully engaged. We love taking
gardeners to exciting places around the world and
showing them wonderful gardens while meeting great
gardeners.
If you are interested in a future
tour with Garden Time be sure to
keep checking out the
www.GardenTime.tv website. We will update the tour
page with any information on new and upcoming trips.
Keep it under wraps but we are just starting to look at
a possible tour to Southern Italy and Sicily in the fall
of 2023 (mid-to-late September). If you are interested
in joining us, drop us a line at gardentime@comcast.net.
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