“Come again during springtime and your eyes will be dazzled to see our landscape coloured by the blooming tulips,” the owner of a souvenir shop in Amsterdam, the Netherlands said to me many years ago when I was buying some ceramic tulips as gifts for family and friends back home in Australia.
As it was winter then, I had to be satisfied seeing Netherlands’ most loved blossom in photos, paintings and artworks. However, the shopkeeper’s comment seeded in me a desire to visit the country at least one more time to see flowering tulips in fields and gardens.
