Private Keukenhof Tulip Tour

Private Keukenhof Tulip Tour

Keukenhof Gardens opens for about eight weeks in spring and in that time it draws over a million visitors, which tells you something about how spectacular it is. I offer these tours in April only, which I’ll explain below. For a preview, there’s a one-hour live stream video from the gardens at the bottom of this page.

Hotel Pickup I’ll pick you up from your hotel in Amsterdam. We’re generally going against the traffic heading out of the city, so the drive to the gardens takes about 45 minutes. Plenty of time to talk about Amsterdam, the Netherlands, tulips, or whatever else comes up.

Early Start We leave at 9am to get to Keukenhof before the main crowds arrive. The gardens are 80 acres and planted with seven million bulbs a year, so they absorb large numbers of visitors surprisingly well, but the early morning light is also just better for photographs.

The Gardens We spend about three hours exploring. There’s far too much to see everything, which is where having a guide is genuinely useful. I’ll show you what’s looking best that day, tell you the stories behind the tulips from their origins in Central Asia through Tulip Mania in the 1630s to the extraordinary modern cultivation industry, and find you the best spots for photos. I enjoy photography and I’ll happily take pictures of you and your group. Here are photos from my Keukenhof tours in previous years.

The Windmill We’ll stop at the Keukenhof windmill and I’ll give you a proper explanation of how windmills actually work, complete with diagrams. Most people are surprised by how many different things they were used for: pumping water, grinding grain, sawing timber, crushing chalk, processing cloth. They were the industrial engine of the Dutch economy for centuries.

The Tulip Fields After the gardens we visit the tulip fields, which stretch flat and colourful all the way to the horizon and are everything you imagine when you picture Holland in spring. Earlier in the season there are also daffodil and hyacinth fields, the hyacinths in particular with a scent that stops you in your tracks.

Dutch Pancake Lunch We stop for lunch at a restaurant that has been in the same family since the 1970s. It’s tucked away on the edge of a nature reserve and it has to be seen to be believed, genuinely one of the quirkiest places I know. Over lunch we’ll talk about Tulip Mania, the extraordinary speculative bubble of the 1630s when the country briefly went completely mad over tulip bulbs. It’s a better story than most people realise.

When to Come I only run these tours in April, even though the gardens are open from mid-March to mid-May. Here’s the honest picture: in March the tulips are very unlikely to be in bloom yet, though the daffodils and hyacinths are beautiful. The first week of April is also not guaranteed. By May the tulips are usually finished and the azaleas have taken over. April is the sweet spot, but exactly when the tulips peak depends on whether we’ve had a warm or cold early spring and there’s no way to predict it precisely. I’ll always give you my best current assessment when you book. Sorry I can’t be more definitive about it.