Hello and welcome to the final entry! and goodbye! - to another A-Z series on M-i-V...
All through April I've been posting on Museums & Monuments Across the World - mostly those I've been to and a few on my bucket list that I haven't been able to visit yet. Museums are one of my favourite ways to get to know a culture, they sum up what those peoples want to preserve and pass onto their grandchildren, the facets they want to show their foreign visitors, how they perceive, present and preserve their own storyline and that of their interactions with the world. I hope you've enjoyed museum hopping with me!
Z is for Zomerhof and for Zocher
For this last entry I'm going far back, further back into the past than that 2007 trip I talked about yesterday. And not to a museum but a landmark garden that I visited in 1999 September. At the time I didn't realise I was lucky to witness what I did, it only dawned on me much later.
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| Zomerhof 1999 Sept. Keukenhof Gardens. |
In 1998 September we went to Amsterdam, I've mentioned this before in the V post as how the Van Gogh Museum was on top of the itinerary. Lower down the list were the tulip fields of Holland. They had got onto my wishlist because they'd featured prominently in an iconic song sequence in a Bollywood movie and, much more importantly, in the early 90's I had worked on a market study on floriculture and Amsterdam was a major hub of the global flower trade. That also meant I knew I wouldn't get any tulips as the season is short, lasting from March to early May only. But I still wanted to go round and see the gardens for myself. Therefore, we landed up in Keukenhof and found an exhibition of summer bulbs going on - Zomerhof which means 'summer garden.'
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| Zomerhof 1999 Sept. Keukenhof Gardens. |
Keukenhof's origins go back to the 15th century - it is tied to the grounds of Teylingel Castle and Jaqueline of Bavaria, who used the 'Keukenduyn' for hunting. In 1641 Keukenhof Castle was built. Landscape architects Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher designed the gardens in 1857 in the English landscape style, that became the core around which Keukenhof grew. In 1949, the idea came up for an exhibition of spring flowering bulbs by 20 growers, so the following spring i.e. 1950 the first tulip exhibition was held and Keukenhof became an instant hit.
Zomerhof however, was a one off, because the park is open only during spring, this year for instance it's open from March 19th to May 10th. That was a special exhibition held to mark its 50 anniversary in 1999, from 19th August to 19th Sept and fortunately, I had fetched up at Amsterdam within that exact time. I came to know this years later by some random chance researching something entirely different. There have been only 2-3 Zomerhofs in Keukenhof's 75 year history. Super lucky, all things considered.
The spring tulip gardens are hugely popular and draw, in that teeny tiny short season, mere few weeks, more than a million visitors. Read more about the Keukenhof tulip gardens by clicking the link here and a very interesting collection of factoids including a comparison with Kew over here.
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Thanks a million for reading and keeping me company as I have refreshed my memories of trips recent and long past. Particularly to those who've invariably read every post, thank you for your support, you know who you are - it is much appreciated. I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed the nostalgia fix. And if you've taken the A-Z Challenge and survived, then congrats! - you've made it. Have a wonderful May.
Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2026
That looks like an amazing garden.
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