TULIP TIME: ONE POINT-AND-SHOOT MOMENT AFTER ANOTHER.

Byline: Mike Shoup Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Holland in the spring is a mecca for flower lovers the world over - a colorful landscape of such astounding beauty as to render dull indeed the most descriptive adjectives penned by lowly travel scribes. That albatross of modern mass travel, the point-and-shoot camera, says it so much better.

To put it another way: If ever a time exists when the proverbial picture is indeed worth a thousand words, this is it.

I'd been here before, but this visit was a first for my wife, M.J., and her mother, Mary.

We'd come in late April, primarily to roam the countryside and see the tulips bloom, but also to check out several museums in the region - one devoted to bulbs, another to windmills and yet another to Rembrandt. Still another goal would be to visit the nearby Aalsmeer Flower Auction, which sells 3.5 billion flowers and 370 million plants a year and claims to be the world's largest flower auction center.

We found the bulk fields about 15 minutes south of Haarlem, in the town of Hillegom.

And the first thing that hit us was not the sight of flowers but their fragrance. Cuh-click. Cuh-click. Cuh-click. Three little cameras recorded the sight, if not the scent.

We'd wandered no more than a mile or two farther south, past occasional farmhouses and greenhouse centers, when the fields before us opened to an extraordinary sight: Row upon row and field upon field of blooming tulips, stretching flat and in all directions to the horizon, from fluorescent reds and vivid yellows to the palest, most subtle pinks and lavenders.

At the edge of another field, a worker labored over the engine of a machine which, we judged from the pile of blossoms nearby, was used to pick tulip petals before they fell. Tulips are beheaded while in full bloom to divert maximum strength to the bulb, as well as to protect against potential diseases generated by fallen, decomposing petals.

Like farming everywhere, much of the bulb production - from planting through harvesting and sorting - is mechanized today, although the bulbs are still cleaned and separated by hand after being taken from the ground.

We'd budgeted the next day for Keukenhof Gardens, plotting to get there shortly after the 8 a.m. opening, well ahead of the tour-bus hordes that descend on Keukenhof every day from throughout Western Europe.

``It's beautiful, and it just keeps getting better,'' said my wife as we strolled the green and gently rolling landscape, where beds of brilliant daffodils and tulips cascaded down slopes and along ponds, reflecting back near-perfect chromatic images from the sun-splashed water.

There were tulips three inches tall, and three feet tall, many startling in their brilliance. Beds of anemones and freesia. Seas of white and yellow daffodils undulating beneath rows of beech trees. And hyacinths far bigger than we'd ever seen, providing an overlay of fragrance that rose and fell with the breezes that swept in from the North Sea, just a few miles to the west.

But by 11 a.m., the place was mobbed; you walked at the crowd's pace, instead of your own. We ordered bulbs for fall delivery in the United States, and we got the heck out of there by noon.

Ninety bulb growers put Keukenhof's gardens together each year. They dig and sculpt gardens and then plant 6 million bulbs, all over a period of 10 months, for a display that lasts one-fifth that time. Then the gardens are torn apart, and preparations begin for the next year.

We beat a retreat to nearby Lisse, where we sought out the Bulb District Museum. Here, the history and economics of bulb growing are related through the aid of early farm implements such as bulb diggers and planters, baskets, water jugs, wheelbarrows, even old wooden machines that sorted bulbs by size, with the larger ones going to market and the smaller going back into the sandy soil.

We spent the next day in Leiden, catching the train in Overveen and discovering shortly thereafter that the line ran straight through the heart of the bulb district. The fields of tulips were every bit as spectacular from the train as they'd seemed from the car.

On the final day of our trip, we made an early morning visit to the Aalsmeer Flower Auction, just outside Amsterdam, which is open to visitors only from 7:30 a.m. to 11 a.m., Monday through Friday.

We'd never seen anything like this place. It is a co-op of more than 5,000 growers of plants, flowers and shrubs who come together under one roof to market their products - roses, tulips, carnations, chrysanthemums, freesias, gerberas and much more - to the world. The floor space is the equivalent of 120 football fields.

Much to our surprise, as we drove north and east of Amsterdam on the way out of Holland, we encountered still more stunning fields of tulips. Ah, yes, somebody told us. There may be more tulips grown in northern Holland today than in the southern bulb district.

Glad we didn't pack those cameras!

On Location Rent a car if you intend to tour the tulip-growing regions of the Netherlands, although it's possible to see some parts by train. Tour bus trips can also be arranged as part of a package, or from your hotel in Amsterdam if you are traveling independently.

Although peak tulip time is only about two months away, it will probably be possible to find a hotel by consulting a travel agent, or by perusing a travel guide and calling your choices directly from the U.S. Or, call the Netherlands Reservation Center, 011-31-70-317-5454, and they'll find one for you. Most likely, a deposit will be required to hold the room.

For more information, contact the Netherlands Board of Tourism, 355 Lexington Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017; or call [phone].

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Photo: The Keukenhof Gardens, southwest of Amsterdam,attracts nearly 1 million tourists during the two-month tulip season.

Netherlands Board of Tourism

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