Feature: a visit to the land of bulbs.

Dazzling Blooms Abound in Keukenhof, Holland

Springtime is heralded, often anticipated by the welcome colors of flowering bulbs. Avid gardeners wait for the snowdrops that begin a long season of blooms that continues with dwarf irises, anemones and hyacinths. Daffodils and fritillaria lead up to the main event: tulips in every color of the rainbow (except blue). The appearance of these flowers with their exuberant colors usually makes gardeners only want more.

Fortunately, new varieties are available each year, just when the yearning for new, bigger and more fragrant blooms takes hold. Most hybrids are developed in Holland, and 90 percent of that harvest is exported to the U.S. The springtime displays in that land of bulbs are magnificent and plentiful, tempting many aficionados and collectors to go and see for themselves just where and how bulbs are cultivated, and have a first look at varieties making their debuts. April, when eye-popping tulip varieties and other bulb hybrids are in full bloom, is the ideal time to travel to Holland.

Hybridization has become such an art that the resulting blossoms are themselves art. The latest products of this constant crossing of floral genes are on view at the Keukenhof Bulb Show, an enticing, sometimes overwhelming, display of color and form which will leave you dazzled and addicted. Spread out over approximately 70 acres of an old estate, Keukenhof features bulb vendors from around the world who are assigned a specific area to plant in the fall. They return in the spring for the brief but glorious nine weeks that the show is open to the public.

Rivers of Color

Magically, everything is in bloom at once. Blue hyacinths and muscari are used frequently to offset the hotter colors of the tulips, fritillaries and daffodils. Some areas are planted so that the effect of a well-timed mass bloom can be demonstrated--like a river of white narcissus and blue muscari that seem to flow through a wood. Paler blue Puschkinia libanotica and Narcissus "Toto" have an even cooler effect. An urn full of buttery daffodils with white anemones spilling over the edge is an idea worth stealing. But be careful: What you see may not be what you ultimately get. For example, pure white parrot tulips and hyacinth hollyhocks featured in a display won't, in reality, bloom in unison.

Fortunately, there are kiosks filled with literature and, immediately adjacent to each of the gardens, sales counters with lists of all the varieties planted. You can also get plenty of information and advice from the vendors themselves, but inspired by their magnificent new varieties, you might be tempted to divert from your shopping list and make some impulse buys. For example, the combination of Fritillaria "Chopin" and the double Tulipa x "Princess Irene"--their purple stems and veining in each orange flower accentuated by their proximity--may make it impossible to wait for the fall catalogues to arrive. In short, it's easy to drop a fortune on tulips and other bulbs here.

With the allure of color, scent and magnificent new varieties, you can easily go astray at Keukenhof, which is admittedly overwhelming and potentially overstimulating. This is, after all, an exhibition space with densely packed beds and planters, not how a true collector would display his prizes. For that, an excursion is necessary to Het Loo Palace gardens, where bulbs are planted in traditional, formal arrangements. Both Keukenhof and Het Loo are grand, created, as they were, for display. But the flower bulbs planted at Het Loo have plenty of space between them, making it possible to fully enjoy and take in the magnificence of each bloom as you slowly stroll by. Seen from the rooftop of the palace, the gardens appear to be enormous tapestries, delicately tinted Persian carpets of boxwood parterres with hints of color washed over them--unlike the brilliant exuberance of Keukenhof's densely packed beds and planters.

Tulip lovers may leave Keukenhof with more bulbs and flowers than their gardens can hold. Fortunately, Het Loo's gift shop sells extraordinary Delftware tulipieres to show off the new prizes.

Sidebar: Where Life and Art are Intertwined

In Holland, life as well as art show how the passion for bulbs and blooms became an integral part of a society and culture. Much is revealed about their history and cultivation in the Dutch city of Haarlem, which will remind you of downtown Manhattan, but without the canals. Haarlem's Franz Hals Museum provides a historical perspective of the economic and cultural intertwining of flowers and Dutch society. Inside this delightful museum are spectacular modern terra-cotta tulipieres in outrageous forms--like a reclining man and a bull's head.

From Haarlem, a trip to the town of Leyden via the upper level of a double-decker train affords a grand view of the hectares of growing fields between the two towns. Canal boats chug through these massive flat plains of kaleidoscopic color. A brief walk along a canal through this gorgeous town leads to the Hortus Clusianum. Also called Clusius's garden, it was named for the 17th century botanist and collector who introduced the tulip to the Netherlands in 1593. There are no modern hybrids here, only species tulips bedded out along pathways between boxed specimens of plants from around the world. One section features a re-creation of Clusius's test plots, where small rectangular beds hold individual groups of tulips--all labeled and organized, as true to his original categorization as possible.

Behind the venerable scientist's bust, placed under a tree in another part of the garden, are a few wispy, delicate yellow flowers with bell-shaped cups opening on slightly spiraling stems. These are the true Persian tulips, Tulipa sylvestris. Fragile and inconstant in nature, they hardly seem to be the stuff to launch a financial empire. Rather, they look more like they belong to Botticelli's floral carpet in the Birth of Venus. Yet, between the distribution of goods along the silk road from the Near East and the Ottoman Empire, and cross-pollination in modern times, an enormous economy was built around these flowers.