Get lost among seven million flowers at Keukenhof

Keukenhof is a garden of 7 million spring-flowering bulbs outside Lisse, and it is open for about eight weeks a year. It is less a park than a showroom: around a hundred growers and exporters plant it as a living catalog of what the Dutch bulb trade has to sell.

On this trip it comes at the end of the bike ride through the fields, so the flowers arrive twice in one day: first as farmland, then arranged on purpose.

It is busy, with about 1.4 million people coming through in those eight weeks, and it earns it. The beds run through the grounds of an old estate where Countess Jacoba of Bavaria went hunting six hundred years ago. The garden itself is younger: a group of bulb growers and exporters came up with the plan in 1949, and it opened the following year.