Her majesty, The Tulip

It is spring, so after spending so much time in Holland I finally went for the ultimate Dutch experience: The tulips. Keukenhof is a disneyland of flowers. It’s an atraction park built around the idea of a "perfect" garden, meaning explosive colors, velvety carpets of grass, manicured flower beds and not one weed in sight. Being a gardener myself, I know this is not easily achieved, so I couldn't help thinking how much herbicide must go into the soil and how toxic it must be. Not surprisingly there aren’t many insects around, which seems quite suspicious considering the obscene amount of flowers in full bloom. Mind you, there are no wilted flowers either, any plant that has finished its flowering cycle is promptly removed from view. This is the least sustainable garden one can ever imagine.

Don’t get me wrong. It is stunning and beautiful, a really enjoyable experience. It’s just that being there raised quite some issues for me. Seeing all these magnificent creatures that have resulted from human manipulation and the way they are arranged, an order that has nothing to do with nature and a lot with human aesthetics was disturbing. On one hand it made me think of the endless human desire for control, but also of how the paradigm of what is a garden has changed through history. Gardens used to be places where we would grow our food, and play with flowers.


As Michael Pollan writes, grassy lawns were invented as a status symbol by tudor times aristocrats to set one thing straight "I am so rich, I don’t need to grow my food" and we just have been copying that model. Sadly, today, most people in the western world will never know what it feels like to eat something that they have grown.

The garden for me has always been a place where I could enjoy playing with nature, trying my best to harness my controlling impulse, to really engage in an interactive, joyful relationship. A game that always ends with the realization that She will always do it better and prettier. When I walk in the mountains in Tepoztlan I am always amazed at how any little patch of wild growth can look just perfect to me. And it is something I could never imitate.

It seems to me that Nature has the most refined sense of aesthetics one could ever attain. It is delicate, it is powerful, and yet it manages to maintain a perfect balance. It is also playful, I was reminded of that while watching a white peacock in the gardens. Why if not, would She bestow him with that cute little crown. His entire being is proof that there are reasons well beyond functionality in Natures creation like fun and sheer pleasure.

The tulips are amazing though, and I can see in its blazing petals and elegant stem the reason for the dutch passion that reached at a certain point a level of madness, like the fact that the possession of a certain bulb was enough to purchase a canal side house. And that brings me back to Michael Pollan, who devotes to this flower, a chapter in his book The Botany of Desire. In this book, he proposes the idea that, maybe, plants are playing on our desires and thus using us to ensure their propagation. The Tulip made people fall in love with it, and so, it is now an extremely successful plant. She made them feed her reproduce her, hybridize her, and shift her shape into the most amazing varieties. She made the dutch people devote her an entire attraction park, so millions of visitors each year can admire her radiant grace.

I do recommend a visit to Keukenhof, but also Michael Pollan's, Second Nature, an insightful, honest and funny view of his experience with gardening.

I want to share with you an amazing talk Michael Pollan gave on Ted, called A plant's eye view.

and a sea of spring flowers...