'In their history you have everything of humanity': What's behind our curious obsession with the tulip?

Girl meets skipper, girl falls in love with a life on the high seas. It’s a story as old as the ocean in Netherlands harbour towns, says 45-year-old tour guide Josette Vermeulen. Still, Vermeulen has no regrets. At 18 she had secured a place at a teacher-training college in her native Enkhuizen, a harbour town north of Amsterdam. But she signed up for a holiday job as a cook on board a traditional wooden schooner taking tourists from Enkhuizen into the North Sea, and after that, she says, “it was all over as far as a life on land was concerned”.

Two years later, Josette and her skipper husband built a traditional 17th-century-style Dutch topsail schooner from scratch, with a delicate hull and brilliant white sails fluttering on three masts. The couple sailed the seas of Europe for the next 12 years, taking enthusiastic tourists on voyages around the coastlines of England, France,Finland and Ireland. “Of course, today I remember the charming holidaymakers and the glorious sunshine,” says Vermeulen, “rather than the 18-hour days and the terrible storms!”

So where do the tulips come in? History is the other unavoidable romance in Enkhuizen, a port whose heritage as a leading light of the Dutch Golden Age is written into its fine Dutch Renaissance architecture. After Vermeulen had given birth to her first daughter and spent a year at sea with the newborn, she decided it was time to return to dry land and went back to school to study a series of bachelor’s degrees in history, cultural studies and education.

Within a few years she had established herself as one of Enkhuizen’s top tour guides, taking the happy cruise-goers who landed at the port on tours of the city. The Netherlands isn’t all, as she puts it, “wooden shoes, marijuana, windmills and rain”.

Her interest in tulips came by chance when the tourist office called to tell her their chief horticultural lecturer had fallen ill. Would she step into the breach and put together a talk on her nation’s most famous blooms?

Within weeks she was hooked. This year Vermeulen will sail on two bulbfield cruises on MS Serenade and MS Bellejour, both new vessels for Titan. “There’s something about tulips,” she says. “Yes, they are that other cliché of the Netherlands; but in their history you have everything of humanity: our passion and our stupidity.”

These days Vermeulen begins her tulip talks, and her tours of the bulbfields of West-Frisia and the flower gardens at Keukenhof, with a picture painted by Flemish artist Jan Brueghel in 1640, which satirises tulip speculators – the many thousands of investors who lost money in the 17th century “tulip bubble” – by depicting them as monkeys.

In a way, says Vermeulen, little has changed. She points out that many of her British tour-goers admit to spending up to €300 on snowdrop bulbs, the latest perennials to witness a collectors’ craze. And American tourists often worry about their bulbs being eaten by deer, which find these tender orbs delectable. British cruise-goers are the most inquisitive, Vermeulen says – amateur horticulturalists who put both her, and the tulip growers who join her talks, through their paces.

She is often asked how you can preserve tulip bulbs through the winter to produce another crop of blooms. Vermeulen advises digging the bulbs up, drying them, peeling them and then replanting. Cut flowers are also a preoccupation with a lot of visitors. Many of us will identify with the disappointment of returning home to find the stems drooping. As regards this, there is no secret: “It’s all to do with the species,” Vermeulen says. “These days most tulips are bred to have upright stems when the flowers are cut.”

When it comes to bulb-buying, many tour-goers thrill for parrot tulips – the wavy, twisted and deeply frilled petals that look like upturned skirts.

These are what most visitors to Keukenhof (open this year until May 19) want to buy. The flower garden, in Lisse, south Holland is one of the world’s largest. Every year seven million bulbs are planted, in their bright and variegated beauty, over 32 hectares. Striped tulips, a style that was prized during the tulip bubble, are also popular. Back then the stripes were caused by the bulb’s infection with a virus; these days their appearance is the product of decades of plant breeding.

This year Vermeulen will lead a variety of tours. American visitors often like to visit Dutch homes and eat and drink typical local cheese and coffee, and she has branched out to provide corporate visitors with background information on Dutch healthcare and society.

Tulips, however, remain her favourite topic, especially at the height of spring, when she cycles home through the bulbfields among bright flower heads bobbing in the spring breeze.

She likes the fact that they are no mere tourist curiosity. “If you have a good season you can sell a lot of bulbs; in the Netherlands the tulip is still gold.”