Keukenhof is dug up and rebuilt every single year. Each autumn about forty gardeners hand-plant seven million bulbs donated by more than a hundred Dutch growers, and the whole display is lifted again when the eight-week spring season closes. The bulbs go in three layers at different depths, late varieties deepest and early ones near the surface, so as one wave fades the next pushes up through it and no bed stands bare. The setting is older than the flowers. The Zochers, the father-and-son architects behind Amsterdam's Vondelpark, laid these winding paths, ponds and trees out as an English landscape park in 1857. Bulb exporters turned the grounds into a permanent showroom for their trade in 1949, and it opened to the public the following spring.
Outside the gates the fields are the greater spectacle: flat blocks of red, yellow and pink running dead straight to the horizon, best met from a bicycle on the lanes between them. They are crops, not decoration. The flower is a by-product. A grower walks the rows to check colour and pull diseased plants, and then the heads are cut off so the plant's energy drops back into the bulb, which is the thing that actually gets sold. A strip that blazed on Tuesday can be plain green by Friday. Daffodils lead from late March, hyacinths carry the scent through April, and the tulips fill out from mid-April into early May. Keukenhof sells timed entry and the paths near the gate are busy by mid-morning. The fields belong to growers, so you look from the verge and keep off the rows.