Laughter, Lilacs, and Lifelong Memories: Our Dutch Flower Adventure
Vonda flies solo this week — well, solo with excellent company. Fresh off the plane from a week in the Netherlands, she's joined by two of her travel mates, Tim Farrell AIFD and Julie Poeltler AIFD, to relive the "Dutch Adventure": a trip 18 flower friends took together through Amsterdam, the bulb fields, and the beating heart of the world's flower trade. It started, Julie explains, with a simple worry — that as everyone moves into the next season of life, floral friends who only see each other once a year at conventions might stop seeing each other at all. So she and Helen Miller decided to do something about it, enlisted travel planner Lois Wallace (who had organized their Germany trip twenty years earlier), and filled a bus.
Canals, hooks, and why IKEA finally makes sense
The week opened with a canal cruise through Amsterdam, and for Tim — used to an American sense of history that tops out around 250 years — gliding past buildings five and six hundred years old, built on a dug-out marshland, was staggering. Julie's favorite discovery was the furniture hooks mounted on the gables: staircases and windows are so narrow that furniture comes in through the window. "Now I understand why IKEA is so phenomenal," she laughs. Several of the group visited the Anne Frank House that first night, a powerful experience by every account. And everyone learned the first rule of Amsterdam fast: watch out for the bicycles. They have the right of way, and they know it.
Gardens, grafted lilacs, and a new respect for the price of a stem
From there the itinerary rolled through the Arnhem open-air museum (with fruit trees trained flat into living fences), a Dutch wine cellar and tasting, and the gardens of a royal palace, where boxwood hedges six inches tall were clipped into patterns so precise Tim compared them to a quilt — with gravity-fed fountains engineered centuries before anyone could just plug in a pump.
Then came historic Aalsmeer, and one of the trip's biggest florist "aha" moments. The group toured greenhouses where lilacs are grown for forcing: bushes dug up and ferried out to little canal islands for part of the season, brought back and replanted in the greenhouse to be forced into bloom — and each bush yields only about 25 stems. "I hated paying three or four dollars a stem for lilac before," Tim admits. "Now I totally understand it." Julie's favorite guide of the whole week was there too: a grafting specialist carrying on his grandfather's work in the same greenhouses, so plainly proud of his craft. It's the kind of behind-the-scenes look that changes how you talk to customers about what flowers cost.
The hyacinth field: a unanimous number one
Ask all three for their most memorable moment and they don't hesitate — it's the same one. The bus turned a corner on the way cross-country and the first flower field appeared: hyacinths, patchworks of pink and lavender and white running to the horizon, the fragrance reaching them before the driver even opened the door. Eighteen adults gasping like kids in a candy shop. "It was very guttural," Tim says. "You felt it in your soul... part of your soul was like, hey, I'm home." Julie still gets goosebumps describing everyone's oohs and ahs. Keukenhof followed the same day — Julie was moved to tears rounding a corner into a bank of orange tulips, and Tim, who lives practically next door to Longwood Gardens and wasn't expecting much, was blown away by a "river" of blue muscari hundreds of feet long. One insider detail stuck with Vonda: bulbs there are planted four deep, layered so the display keeps blooming across the season.
The surprise fact of the trip: those endless postcard fields aren't cut-flower production at all. The blooms are beheaded so the foliage can feed the bulb — the entire spectacle exists to ship bulbs around the world.
Star Wars at the auction, and an old dog's new tricks
The Aalsmeer flower auction — housed in what they were told was once the largest building in the world — looked to Tim like something out of Star Wars: roughly 3,000 cart drivers buzzing across the floor among some 6,000 employees, flowers streaming from auction to buyer to loading dock. All three opened their shops in the 1980s, right as the surge of Dutch flowers hit the U.S., and standing there Tim couldn't help wondering how many of the stems they'd touched over four decades had passed through that very building. Vonda's conclusion is one for every florist who's ever groused about a price increase: after watching how many hands touch a single stem, "I think we'd probably all won't complain about another cent or two on flowers for a while."
The trip capped off with a design class at the Boerma Institute, where Mike Boerma taught the group a wire armature technique and — the real lightbulb — applied Fibonacci proportions horizontally and three-dimensionally, giving name and reason to the loose, meadowy style everyone's seeing everywhere. "Obviously you can teach an old dog new tricks," Tim grins. Then came the flower parade: floats and flower-covered cars (including a Tesla that reportedly needed a special permit) traveling over 25 miles through small towns in full celebration mode. Sprinkle in a beach detour, a cheese stop, and a wooden-shoe maker as proud of his craft as any designer, and you have a week nobody wanted to end. The best compliment, Julie says, came from Tim himself: "We need the reunion travel in two years." That was the whole point.
Key takeaways
- Don't wait for conventions — plan real travel with your flower friends while you can; the relationships are the point.
- Seeing how lilacs are forced and flowers are auctioned builds genuine respect for wholesale prices — and better cost conversations with customers.
- Even veteran designers grow: a new armature technique or Fibonacci applied horizontally can reframe a "trendy" style as principled design.
- The famous Dutch bulb fields aren't for cut flowers at all — the blooms are sacrificed to grow the bulbs.
- Shared passion multiplies joy: the same field you'd admire alone will move you to tears in a busload of people who love flowers.