Holland
by Charlie Dunham

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Holland was another great international trip for the American Ivy Society. Dirk Laan, a native of Holland planned, hosted and guided the tour. He was a walking encyclopedia of Dutch history, landmarks, anecdotes and commentary with an unending sense of humor. 

Our trip got off to a fine start with KLM airlines which was a good introduction to the reception and welcome we would receive all over Holland, plus the fact that everywhere we went people spoke great English.

Our base of operations was appropriately named Tulip Inn. When we arrived Suzanne was waiting with her reception materials, goodies and instructions to be ready to leave for a boat tour of Amsterdam at one o’clock, which our biological clocks interpreted as 6 o’clock in the morning after a sleepless night. But, what a wonderful introduction it was to the city. The canals are still today, as they were when the city was first founded, an essential cultural and commercial heart. The beauty of the bridges and the buildings that line the canals date back not for years but for centuries and are still functional in today’s world and create an atmosphere that is unique. 

There is so much to see in Amsterdam we were delighted to have another day to spend when our biological clocks were better adjusted... My daughters and I chose to see both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, but just walking the streets along the canals looking at the houses and shops and absorbing the unique and beautiful character of the city was a delight... We had a great lunch at an Indonesian restaurant.

Just be careful you don’t get run over by a bicycle. Bicycles are the preferred mode of transportation in the city and riders whiz around on the bicycle paths at incredible speed and expect pedestrians to keep out of their way.

At the Tulip Inn we had our own area for breakfast buffet where everyone met to start the day and at night the bar was a gathering place for some of the more resilient participants for more socializing. Heineken is certainly the national beer of Holland. It is featured at every pub and restaurant. For some reason it tastes better in Holland, or maybe it’s a psychological frame of mind.

I was amazed at how much agriculture we saw riding along in the bus. The part of Holland that we toured included a lot of flat, fertile farmland that had been reclaimed from flooded areas. Of course the canals or really drainage ditches were everywhere. It is not difficult to have a waterfront lot, go out your front door and take off in a boat. For the first time I realized how the windmills worked to raise the water to the next level in stages until it gets back to a river or canal that flows into the ocean. The windmills today are largely relics of the past, preserved for tourists or local nostalgia, and replaced by pumps to raise the water level and wind turbines to generate electricity. We didn’t see any dykes the little boy could put his finger in to stop the leak, they were large earthen barriers, but it’s a nice story anyway.

Our first full day started off with the world famous gardens at Kuekenoff known for  tulips and the tulip festival, but it is much more than that. It is a beautifully designed and immaculately maintained park with magnificent trees sheltering lawns interspersed with flower beds, meandering paths, ponds, fountains, and streams. We were a little late to see the tulips at their best but were rewarded with a fine display of rhododendrons. Still there were plenty of tulips.

Tulips like ivies have a classification system but it is based on the shape of the flowers and the season of bloom. Early, midseason and late tulips extend the bloom time for almost three months.

Food is a necessary part of any tourist attraction and Kuekenoff has a variety of eateries. My choice was a smoked herring sandwich with a Heineken beer. Very Dutch.

The flower market at Aalsmeer was one of the many highlights of the tour.  ‘Incredible” was a common reaction. The auction is a cooperative owned and run by the growers. The auction and grounds occupy an area equal to 250 football fields and had sales of 1,600 million Euros in 2006. Everywhere you looked there were carts of flowers of every description moving on tracks to the auction room where buyers were waiting. Twenty two million units are sold daily. For each unit a computerized auction clock starts with the price decreasing at a rapid rate and the first buyer to press his button buys the unit and sets the price. With connections to the nearby airport, the flowers will be in florist shops in the U.S. the same day.

Our garden tours included a variety of private gardens that were designed to attract paying visitors and it was usually the woman of the house who was in charge of the garden. Most had a special “hospitality room” for providing refreshments that were home made and delicious. These areas were often existing out buildings that had been attractively transformed, but some were new constructions.

Each garden was of course  different but to generalize there were some common features. The designs tended to be formal with parterres (beds enclosed by dwarf clipped hedges) and clipped specimen evergreens like box and  yews. This style of garden  can be traced back to Versailles. Another common feature was the use of tall clipped hedges to divide the garden into a series of rooms. This style of garden was made popular by Major Lawrence  Johnston at Hidcote in Gloucestershire England in the early part of the 20^th century. It has several advantages: each garden is screened from surrounding areas and can be developed independently so that a tour through the garden is like a house tour going from room to room. We encountered all manner of garden paths and patios, garden furniture, water features, and garden art within the many rooms. The hedges also offer winter and wind protection, which I think, is important in the part of Holland where these gardens were located.

The Het Loo palace and garden in Apeldoorn, a former royal palace for the ruling king and queen, was a miniature Versailles but in typical Dutch fashion immaculately maintained. The palace furnishing and art collection are quite impressive and we especially appreciated the beautiful fresh flower arrangements.

Each of us on the tour had a favorite among the private gardens. Mine was Die Lange Huys ( the long house). It was an historic old farm house. The garden was divided into rooms and the plant combinations in each room had been carefully thought out and coordinated even encompassing the foliage color of the shrubs . There was a very tasteful use of original sculptures scattered through the garden and a beautiful wild flower garden. In the part of Holland that we saw the land is so intensively utilized there is little room for wild flowers even along the edges of the road. 

My daughters liked the Aquatic Botanic garden. Architects say “For every site there is the perfect project” and what a marvelous example of adapting a garden to a site

On garden tours we always look for  things we can use in our own gardens and from the Dutch we can learn the art of pruning to shape and control plant growth. Espaliers, pleaching and pollarding were all utilized. With espaliers , plants are trained against a flat surface like a wall , or fence, or the side of a building, usually in a symmetrical pattern. Pleaching is a type of pruning used to create a hedge like wall. Trees are planted close together , six to eight feet apart. All the front and back branches are cut off and the side branches woven together (pleached) and then kept pruned like a hedge. Beech was one of the favorite plants used in the gardens we saw. Pollarding is a very severe type of pruning where all side growth is removed and the top is formed into a ball. Some times this is done to the main side branches. We saw this type of pruning on some of the street trees in the towns. 

It was a great tour and our thanks and appreciation to Dirk Laans for his leadership and hard work and to the Ivy Society.

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