Tuesday, April 25, 2023, AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands — Today we and about thirty-five thousand of our tulip-loving friends, visited Keukenof, known as the Garden of Europe, and without a doubt the most stunning flower garden we have ever seen.

On a cool, windy late April day, with brief rain squalls drifting past every half hour or so, Keukenof was at its peak. The traffic getting to the garden was like a University of Oregon football game, backing up the final few miles, until we were directed to one of the last spots in the almost-full parking lot, partially packed with RVs. Just inside, the garden had a big-game feel as well, with excited people packed shoulder to shoulder on narrow paths surrounded by colorful beds of tulips, daffodils and other flowers. Everything about the experience was surprising–the size of the crowds, the extent of the 75-acre plus garden, the surreal beauty of the flowers.

Keukenof’s 40-some gardeners plant seven million tulip bulbs every fall, layering them three-deep in beds so that new flowers come up during the short run when the garden is packed every spring, drawing one and a half million visitors in just six weeks. The garden once belonged to the inhabitants of a nearby castle, but now it’s an international tourist destination. It’s hugely popular with Germans, Americans, Italians, and the Dutch, of course, but we overheard people speaking many other languages.

We probably heard the word “beautiful” in two dozen different languages. The garden featured ponds and a windmill that was whipping in the wind, pavilions filled with flower displays, hundreds of beds of purple, red, and yellow, or often, a rich mix of colors and flowers, and just outside the park, off in the distance, across hundreds of acres of fields, long rows of tulips grown for their bulbs. The colors were flat out amazing. You can see many of them in the slide show above. Even with the crowds, and everyone blocking the paths trying to take selfies and group photos, the garden was spectacular. Several times, Courtenay and I came around a corner, or emerged from a sea of people, saw another sweeping bed of colorful, perfect flowers, and simultaneously gasped the same thing.

“Wow!”