The American Dream Remains A Dream

The flower bulbs for the Fluwel Specialty Narcissus Collection are all packed up and ready, but this year, we can’t say the same about ‘the’ American Dream. There is a shortage of bulbs, people who ordered American Dream will receive them, but just not in the number they were hoping for. American Dream

This is her, the actual American Dream of many a Daffodil-lover. To be fair: She is a lovely flower, it’s absolutely understandable so many people wanted to have her. American Dream isn’t the only one in this predicament either, unfortunately: Many bulbs emerged from the fields this year in low numbers, or at least lower than expected. When you have over 450 varieties, some of them are bound to have a bad year: We are dealing with live products, after all. The natural process is beautiful, but it does mean that we don’t have full control over the quantity of product. Usually when this happens, and people receive less bulbs than they expected, we compensate them by adding in other varieties. I always try to find ones that are similar or in the same category, but when it comes to American Dream, it isn’t quite so easy. This variety is unique in shape and colour, there aren’t any close look-alikes in our assortment. When I encounter this problem, I try to solve it by giving those customers two of my own personal favourite varieties. In this case, we went for La Delicatesse and Warming Up.  Warming Up

Warming Up is the first large Daffodil to flower at the beginning of the year. She’s really giving you a sneak peek of the other large Daffodils that are going to appear in your garden during springtime. That’s why we named her Warming Up: she’s giving you a little preview of the show. La Delicatesse

And then we have La Delicatesse, an absolutely stunning flower with a beautiful shape, and a teint of white you don’t see that often. Like I said, it’s one of my favourites, and I hope you will love her, too. 

My team must be very proud of me right now: I am actually giving you recommendations of varieties that are available in our web shop right now! You can order them right after reading this, usually I get distracted and talk about lots and lots of other stuff.  Big Ups: A Tulip Mix that absolutely steals the show

See, the point of our newsletters is to get my dear readers interested in the actual world of flower bulbs. I want to tell you all about the people who work so hard in this profession and show you how they do their work, but sometimes that means I forget about actually trying to sell you stuff. But our family needs to eat as well, so I do try to remember every once in a while. Allium Ambassador, one of the most striking of her sort

But to go back to something else yet again: Mother Nature has thrown us a real curveball this past week. On Tuesday, I drove into work when it was 27 degrees Celsius, Thursday it was only 11. Those meager eleven degrees were accompanied by fat raindrops, too. Autumn is coming, you don’t even realise it but in about a week it’ll be September 21, the real start of the next season. But Autumn means one very, very good thing: Time to plant flower bulbs! Tutti Tulpi, one of our most popular mixtures. 50 bulbs in 50 different varieties, hand-picked to ensure that no two bulbs are the same

I’m looking for the right words because I don’t want to sound too pushy, but I have to be honest with you as well. If you’ve been reading my newsletters this year, this will not come as a surprise, but we are dealing with a bad harvest. Or maybe not quite bad, but at least not as good as we’d wanted. We notice it all over the gardening industry, and our own assortment suffers as well. We have lower numbers of bulbs available of a lot of varieties. If there are any varieties that you were particularly looking forward to this year, I do really recommend ordering them as soon as possible, otherwise there is a very real chance you’ll miss out on them.

 Dahlia show garden ‘De Tulperij’ in Voorhout

I don’t want to make this newsletter too long. The weeks of working in the warehouse have finally come to an end, and to clear my head a little I want to visit as many Dahlia growers as possible. That is always a real joy, and I hope to find many more new, unique, and interesting varieties to bring to you through our web shop.  Crocus tommasinianus

Kind regards, 

Carlos van der Veek