For more than 200 years Holland has been the centre of the global trade in cut flowers, through auction company Royal FloraHolland in Aalsmeer. Flowers from all around the world are flown into Amsterdam daily to be auctioned off at about 5am and then shipped around Europe in planes and trucks. It is a testament to the love of things beautiful and a “perfect market”, and a huge nod to Dutch efficiency.
If you walk above the huge flower halls you can smell when you are above the sweetpeas, the hyacinths or the red roses. It is a dream.
And, of course, Amsterdam is most famous for its tulips, as immortalised in the 1958 Max Bygraves song
“England hath contrived to make the adopted foreigners her own,” wrote American horticulturist, businessman and the co-author of
the Cactus and Succulent Journal, Robert Henry Foster, of the plants obtained from around the world to fill such borders.
It is said the first herbaceous borders were designed at Arley Hall & Gardens in Cheshire, England, in 1845: “Amongst the finest in Europe the Gardens have been created over the last 250 years by successive generations of the same family.” In fact, right from the start they were always a reflection of a family or a person’s unique style, be it exuberant and colourful or quiet and constrained.