Keukenhof in particular, and the spring bulb fields of The Netherlands in general, should probably make it to the top of your to-do list if you’re as mad about tulips as I am. Picture a park-like garden, mostly consisting of spring bulb beds and shrubs planted among bright green lawns; now picture old deciduous trees just coming into leaf high ahead. The trees filter the light and the winding river and water features reflect the light here and there, giving the whole garden a rather enchanted atmosphere.

I love these gardens, but because this my third visit to Keukenhof, I genuinely hadn’t expected to see much new. So it was pleasant to be pleasantly surprised: here’s what I found refreshing and extra-gorgeous on this trip:

Bulb fields at the perfect time: On previous trips, I don’t remember the commercial growers’ fields looking so stunning. The drive into Lisse takes you past rainbow stripes of yellow, blue, red and pink; this year we were lucky to see the hyacinths, single early tulips and taller Triumphs just coming into flower. Previous trips brought me here in Week 1 and Week 3 of April; this time, Week 2 was perfect, although warmer or cooler springs will hugely affect what’s flowering when.

Show-garden areas offering stealable ideas: I loved the Keukenhof ‘Inspiration’ gardens, something that may have featured in earlier years but which I’d not seen before (my other trips were with my newborn daughter and other family, and this was the first trip I had plenty of time to linger). Notice the clever use of trompe d’oeil in this girly pink garden — it has mirrors, empty frames suggesting mirrors, and double planters suggesting reflection. Love it!

Another of the Inspiration gardens was this canalside deck, which at the back features raised planters that hold tiny espaliers of apple trees. The seating area is covered to keep out the rain and furnished with casually gorgeous, just-been-styled-for-a-Gardens-Illustrated-photoshoot elegance. Look at this combination of muscari armeniacum album, with pink bellis daisies, along a lace runner over a simple gray wooden table. If this doesn’t conjure the illusion of effortless outdoor-living perfection, I don’t know what does. Large wooden planters at the canalside, some of which seemed to float over the water, hold a combination of dusky purple hyacinth, mixed tulips and anemona blanda.

The joy of block plantings: Ingenious planting combinations at Keukenhof (crocus, chionodoxa, early and late tulips, alliums) are a particular strength of the place, showing how any garden can keep the interest going for 8 weeks in spring. However, I completely fell for this simple combination of Tulip Purissima and Tulip Flaming Purissima, which was repeated in huge rectangles all around the area around the central pavilion. The effect was full, sweet and feminine — like a bowl of strawberry ice-cream (a bride among the tulips looked perfect; I think she was a model on a shoot). Keukenhof always does this to me: it was here I first became betwitched by the Keukenhof ‘blue river’, the mass plantings of muscari armeniacum, and I ended up buying 900 bulbs to carpet a corner of our garden. (Thank God I didn’t get the ones that seed around freely; mine bulk up rather than seeding. I have muscari armeniacum Fantasy Creation, a gorgeous double; pots of this double muscari feature heavily in my Rare Plants for Rare Diseases sale next month). There’s something about Keukenhof that makes me crave mass planting on a grand scale, even if my garden doesn’t have the space for it.

Isn’t it all a bit contrived and un-natural, those bulb beds?

If you think a garden like this isn’t your thing, you may be surprised. No, there’s nothing naturalistic about Keukenhof — “Oh, look, 350 hyacinths in a rectangle”; it’s enough to make Piet Oudolf spin in his grave if he were dead. As breathtaking as I find meadow-style plantings to be, I don’t believe that nor any other loose planting style is the only kind of garden beauty.

Wandering amongst these spring bulb beds, with sun filtering through the breaking buds of the old oaks above, may not make you feel you’ve stumbled on something secret or half-wild. But its formality is wholly a part of its charm. Exploring Keukenhof is like walking through a Klimt design or the contours of a Moorish mosaic: the artistry of the creators, and their mastery over their materials, is part of the wonder.

A few practical notes – make the most of Keukenhof

Don’t worry unduly if you’re thinking of coming to Keukenhof but have limited mobility. Free wheelchairs can be reserved in advance and borrowed for a refundable deposit, and today I also discovered that for €10 non-refundable rental you can borrow an electric mobility scooter. Plenty of older guests get about the garden’s ample 32 hectares with this assistance; I had to use one myself for today’s visit, after badly injuring my foot a few days before.

Do consider bringing a lunch or at least a hearty snack with you; there are plenty of benches and some picnic tables, and a packed lunch leaves you more money for the gift shop.

Thanks, Keukenhof PR team for the press pass; my kids still had to pay, but as my husband was pushing my wheelchair, he came in on my pass. At €14.50 per adult excluding parking — and with children over age 11 paying full price — this is not a cheap outing. But you’re bringing your sandwiches, right? So there you go. Guilt-free and gorgeous. Go!

It’s not happened yet, but I can feel that the bulb lust will soon be upon me. I work my tiny garden intensively and only manage to get four season colour into the border by packing in bulbs among herbaceous perennials. It’s probably inconceivable for me to stuff any more tulips into the hall border near my office window, but for May through August interest, I’m planning for more alliums, more lilies and possibly my first camassias next year. I saw @lialeendertz ‘s piece in the Guardian about alliums and it underscores the most useful thing you’ll ever want to know about ornamental onions: if you don’t hide their tattered leaves with something, you’ll be sorry. I’ve just tucked mine in among astrantia, nepeta and delphiniums and I’m hoping for the best.

So yes, I’m renewing my commitment to summer flowering bulbs to squeeze maximum colour from my small space, but it’s the late winter and early spring flowering snowdrops, crocus, chionodoxa, narcissus and most of all tulips that cast the real spell over me — and my budget — every autumn.

Do you remember how the Catholic church got into a good bit of trouble some centuries ago for selling indulgences, advance absolution for future sins? Hell was big back then, and folks terrified of dying with unconfessed sins on their conscience paid big sums for indulgences, hoping to guarantee life after death by ensuring they’d die “clean”…or so the reasoning went. Spring flowering bulbs are a bit like indulgences: against reason, gardeners faced with the dying of the light invest too much every autumn, trying to guarantee life for their borders on the far side of winter’s chasm. For me, planting spring bulbs — especially those chestnut brown tulips, fat and perfect — is like casting a rope to the other side of January, where my friendly bulb vendor secures it and talks me across with comforting words about “brave crocus” and tulips “like a Dutch still life”. I can resist the crocus (they may be brave, but they get battered by day two), but the tulips will always have a hold on me.

Actually, my bulb vendor is very friendly; Anne and Jack Barnard at Rose Cottage Plants have never sent me tulips that failed to dazzle or, God forbid, were wrongly labeled, an experience I’ve had many times with other mail-order companies. The blackcurrant tinted late purple parrot “Muriel” they recommended last year was indeed stunning, and this year they’ve sourced “Happy Generation” for me, one of the many I saw in my Keukenhof tour this past April, but not usually available from Rose Cottage Plants, as Anne says her customers often avoid bi-coloured tulips. I’ve ordered 30; who knows where I’ll put them, but maybe in pots at the gate.

If you’re trying to decide what tulips are worth buying, definitely ask your vendor, or see these two video tours of the Keukenhof tulip tents I made earlier this year. My voiceover rambles a bit, but you will get a sense of how many beautiful tulip varieties look, rather than relying on the hyperbolic catalog descriptions. You can also see still shots of the tulips and other parts of Keukenhof in my Flickr set.

I have scattered galanthus nivalis, a February flowering double snowdrop, among my hall border and would love to plant a short, black centred perennial like Rudbeckia, whose black eyes might hold on through the snowy months to give me a black-and-white effect in late winter. Any ideas? Rudbeckia “Goldsturm” looks good but seems a bit too tall.

Do you have a bulb addiction? Which tulips mean the most to you, and can you get away without lifting them annually?

As you may or may not know, I went to Amsterdam recently for the tulips, and stayed for the volcano. Stupid geothermal activity. The delay has thrown my work schedule completely, keeping me away from the blog for some time. But I had to post something this evening because, looking over my pictures from the trip and especially the visit to Keukenhof (a huge spring garden in Lisse, in the midst of the bulb fields south of Amsterdam, open until this Sunday), I’m stunned again at the growing conditions of tulips in Holland.

As the proud Dutch will tell you, God made the world but the Dutch made Holland, systematically draining tracts of land (which they call polders) for agriculture, and keeping the land drained with their network of dikes. This is reclaimed, thoroughly sandy soil: passing some builders digging up a sidewalk, I marveled at the spoil they’d dug out, exactly like children’s play sand. I’d always heard that tulips should sit on a little nest of sand at the bottom of the planting hole, but truthfully they’re happy in a very sandy environment, a realisation which will definitely inform where and how I plant this autumn.

It was a cold spring in Holland, just as in Scotland, and only some of the large single early tulips were out, along with miles of hyacinths. Keukenhof isn’t to be missed if you get over to the Netherlands in spring; growers each take a section of land around the lightly wooded lawns of the garden, planting their own displays with thousands of bulbs each autumn. The mature trees are just coming into leaf as the flowers emerge below, creating that dappled sunlight effect that, along with the occasional babbling stream and the dreamy scent of narcissisus and hyacinth, deliver a pretty good approximation of my mother’s idea of heaven.

I don’t know about you, but every October I develop such a strong bulb lust that all memory of the sad, fading foliage of tulips in June disappears, and I can think only of those goblets of colour lit up like Tiffany lamps. This year, I’m thoroughly smug at how well a new combination has turned out: I’ve added the single purple “Passionale” tulip alongisde the wavy orange wonderfulness of the parrot tulip, Prof. Rontgen. Those reliable folk at Rose Cottage Plants recommended (and who was I to resist, browsing their offers during the depth of That Winter) a parrot called Muriel, a sumptuous purple thing which is supposed to marry my Passionale with the Professor. Muriel is just about to make her appearance — I’ll let you know how she fares.

Oh, and those tulips I planted in a row beneath my window? Fabulous. They give exactly the 17th century colours I was looking for, although after seeing at Hortus Bulborum (a bulb “zoo” outside Amsterdam which keeps the greats alive) the wee Duc van Tol tulips that fueled tulipmania way back when, I think my soaring, 24 inch high Mickey Mouse single early tulips have much more majesty.

At Keukenhof, planted in the ground under cover were a selection of tulips from each grower, and many of these were almost over when we saw them, but enough were in good shape to give me that October feeling. The perfection of “Happy Generation”, a red-on-white striped Triumph tulip, far outdoes the fluffy “Carnival de Nice” which I’d had my eye on. Red and white will fit fine into some parts of my spring colour scheme…just. But really I need a bigger garden.

Would you like to see the videos I took inside the Keukenhof tulip tents? I’m in the process of publishing them here on the Stopwatch Gardener channel on YouTube.

Do you get bulb lust? How have yours performed this strange spring?