Keukenhof Gardens
open from March 23 - May 14
Spring at its most beautiful
Nature awakens; slowly, first of all, with winter snowdrops, but then with ever increasing speed. The buds on the trees turn green. Branches sprout, sometimes intertwined with one another. What still felt cold a week ago is now tending towards being on the cool side. In the mornings, the frost makes way for mist. The sun rises higher and higher in the sky. A downpour seems out of place and storms in March almost unheard of. And then, all at once, the first common grape hyacinths appear. By the afternoon, there are already five, and the following day, the first sea of blue bulbs appeared. Your heart skips a beat, and now you know for definite: spring is here! And where better to experience the spring than at Keukenhof? See spring in all its splendour for two whole months.
History
Where Keukenhof is situated now, was a hunting area in the 15th century. Herbs for the kitchen of the castle of Jacoba van Beieren were also collected here; hence the name Keukenhof.
The current park was a section of the sizeable estate of Slot Teylingen, with beautiful untamed bushes and dunes. After the decease of Jacoba van Beieren Keukenhof fell into the hands of rich merchant families. Baron and baroness Van Pallandt invited landscape architects J.D. and L.P. Zocher, designers of the Amsterdam Vondelpark, to make a design for the garden around the castle. This design, in the English landscape style, has always been the basis of Keukenhof.
At the moment the estate belongs to a Corporation. On the initiative of the Lisse mayor of that time and a number of leading flower bulb growers and exporters, an open air flower exhibition was organised here for the first time in 1949. This expanded to an annually recurring event that has always drawn great numbers of visitors from all over the world. This is how Keukenhof became the park that we now know.
Copy from Kuekenhof Website