National Tulip Day: A Tale of Two Tulip Towns

Holland honored their beloved tulip yesterday and the approach of tulip season.  Every year on National Tulip Day, tulip growers set up a huge garden in Dam Square where you can go pluck as many tulips bulbs as you want . . . for free. 

It reminds me that I've got a handful of long overdue posts about tulips and some amazing experiences from last spring. I'll get to those soon (before the next tulip season commences), but in the meantime here's a few fun trivia facts about the tulips and the Netherlands.

1. Tulips are not native to the Netherlands.  They arrived from the Ottoman Empire where Dutch traders first encountered them in the 16th century, specifically in modern-day Istanbul.
2. Dutch skills, expertise, and success at trading eventually led to an unprecedented economic boom in the 17th-cenutry, called the Dutch Golden Age.  The upper class, who were immediately smitten with the delicate, beautiful flower, starting paying huge sums of money to acquire a single tulip bulb (sometimes even more than a house). Tulip bulbs and artistic representations of of tulips (like Delft tiles and still-life paintings) became status symbols.
3. The craze for tulips during the 17th-century has been labeled "Tulip Mania," and the bubble burst in 1637 when the market crashed shortly after 40 bulbs sold for a record 100,000 florins--at a time when the medium yearly income in the Netherlands was 150 florins.
4.  Today, the Dutch are still crazy for tulips, but definitely more level-headed about it.  They  produce 4.23 billion bulbs per year, making it hard to even imagine that the tulip hasn't always been in the Netherlands.  Amazingly, 1.3 billion of those bulbs are sold in the Netherlands as cut flowers (the rest are exported all over the world). 
5. The sandy soil in the high dunes of Holland are perfect for cultivating bulbs, and Dutch growers have cultivated countless varieties of tulips and other types of flowers.  Today, the Dutch have a 92% market share of the world's flower market.  Clearly, they know what they are doing.                      
   

And, #6.  One of world's other major tulip producing regions is Washington State in the U.S.  On a number of occasions, we visited Skagit Valley during tulip season, home to most Pacific Northwest tulip growers . . . the families of all of whom originated from Holland in the1700's.  Since moving to the Netherlands, I've always wondered about the production levels of each of these regions, and yesterday I learned more.  While Holland produces 4.23 billion bulbs each year, Washington State produces 10 million bulbs each year.  Of course, 10 million bulbs is nothing to scoff at, and Skagit Valley is so beautiful it's hard to believe tulip heaven doesn't exist right there.                      

Here are some photos from Skagit Valley in Washington State in April 2009 when Abby turned one year old.

It was a special trip . . . Abby's 1st birthday, and I was 6 months pregnant with Reese.  Tulips are special to our family.