HOW THE DUTCH FLOWER INDUSTRY CONQUERED THE WORLD

 

Growing tulip bulbs on the moon, and a tulip shaped island in the North Sea. Frederick Ruysch’s wunderkammer and contemporary bloemencorsos. A Dutch-Chinese billionaire, aka the Orchid King, recreates a ‘Dutch’ town in northeast China complete with a replica of Amsterdam’s central station and the International Court of Justice. A retired grower recalls a life in flowers, from the Second World War to the European Union. Dutch development policies in Ethiopia today and its former civilizing mission in Java. Auctions, cooperatives, networking, commodity culture, Dutch masculinity, and globalization. These are some of the imaginaries, themes, curious details, and perspectives you will encounter in this book. All of them pivot around Dutch flower culture today and in the Dutch Golden Age, and directly or indirectly link to Aalsmeer’s flower auction, the world’s largest, located not far from Amsterdam.

‘Blossoming forth in all sorts of unexpected directions, Holland Flowering’s petals open out to reflect and encompass an entire world, one well beyond mere flowers: our world.’ – Lawrence Weschler, winner of National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and director emeritus, New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU

Andrew Gebhardt is from the US but has lived in the Netherlands for 10 years and did a PhD at the UvA. Most of his training and writing experience is with poetry, but Holland Flowering is narrative nonfiction, and grew out of his dissertation on the Dutch flower industry.