Fun

‘You really have fun when you’re working, don’t you?’ Someone asked me the other day when I had enthusiastically told her about my puttering around in my Amaryllis greenhouse. It made me think about it for a bit: Do I have fun working? Of course I do, which is not to say that nothing ever goes wrong, we have our daily problems just like anyone else, but overwhelmingly, I have lots of fun during my working days. An unnecessary amount of fun, one might even say.Something new and exciting: Amaryllis 'Yellow Crown'

I get to spend my days tinkering around in my greenhouse, and I often see other people who have the same hobby as I do. It can’t really get any better, if you ask me. Last week, Vlad and I went to the Westland to visit Amaryllis grower- and hybridizer Marko. We visited him to collect a few of the Special Amaryllis bulbs, which have gone live in our webshop today. You can find them under ‘Fluwel Special Amaryllis’.Vlad and Marko, talking about Amaryllis in Marko's warehouse

When we went into his Amaryllis storage room, it felt like walking into my own greenhouse. It looked exactly like my greenhouse does in the summer, except where Marko has dozens and dozens of Amaryllises, I have Daffodils. Marko has that same passion I have, but for a different flower. Commercially speaking, we could never feed our families trying to offer these extremely special, niche varieties, and only a handful of bulbs of each of them too, but we do get delighted comments from true enthusiasts and flower bulb fans, who have found varieties that they had never seen or heard of before, and that makes us happy in return. It’s just fun, offering some of these special things, and that’s all we want to get out of it.For the cybister lovers: Amaryllis 'Cyber Queen' 

I already have a very good feeling about them, but I am also curious to see how this collection is going to do. Vlad and Marko were already talking about next year, and we have had messages from other Amaryllis growers that they would like to participate as well if this year has turned out well. Great news, because this means that we will be able to keep surprising you! I really hope that we can make some Amaryllis fans happy this year, or happier, I should probably say, because I think the average gardener is already quite happy as a person.This beauty is not officially registered, she goes under Nr. 97266-A

When I asked my daughter Pien about this–if she also had the experience that gardeners tend to be happy people–she told me about the downstairs neighbour, but I think she should tell you about them herself:

So to explain why I immediately thought about my neighbour when my dad asked me this question, I should tell you a little bit about our apartment building: We live in what is called a ‘portiekflat’, a common building in Dutch cities. It’s a row of attached houses, three stories high, where every story is a different apartment, so you can live on the ground floor, the first floor, and then the second floor. Nina and I live on the second floor, the top apartment, and while the apartments on the ground floor have a–pretty large, for The Hague!–garden, the other two have a balcony. The middle apartment is occupied by a guy a few years older than Nina and I, he never complains about any noise even though our cats always get the zoomies in the middle of the night and tip over chairs almost every day. The inhabitants of the ground floor are a lady and her son.

Our balcony has a little shed and, in front of it, a clothesline that hangs right above our ground floor neighbour’s garden. And she has a very nice garden: two different sets of furniture, really pretty flower pots, decorations, and, as you can imagine, sometimes some luckily-just-washed-laundry of ours that has fallen down from our clothesline and into her plants. The first time we met her, it was because we had to retrieve socks and an earring. She really is a very nice woman, so she is definitely someone who confirms my dad’s idea that gardeners are nice people.

Another fun fact is that, from our balcony, we don’t just see our neighbour’s garden, but also those of the other people who live in the other ground floor apartments. Every one of them is well taken care of, and as there is lots of sun during the day–three stories is, luckily, not high enough to block out the sun–everyone is always outside. Because of the brick walls surrounding those gardens, it’s very easy to overhear every interesting conversation our downstairs neighbours have: family drama, a boss someone can’t stand, it really feels like our own personal real-life soap series.

There is, however, one exception within all these extremely well-kept little gardens: a neighbour a few houses to the right. He has his whole garden covered in a kind of plastic fake grass, with one–also plastic–shed in the far corner. Sometimes, he retrieves a table and chairs from that little shed and puts them onto the plastic grass to have dinner outside, when the weather is nice. After, he always neatly puts them back into there. Nina and I have often wondered if he knows that he is the only one with a garden like this: obviously, he lives on the ground floor, so he can’t see the other gardens and therefore might not realise how unintentionally funny his choices are. And they are quite funny, because how do you think he cleans this plastic grass? He has a special kind of vacuum! He really vacuum cleans his plastic grass sometimes. I didn’t even know it was possible, but he does it. But anyway, we have run into him on the street from time to time, and he is also a very nice man, so it is obviously not required to like gardening in order to be a happy person. 

I’m taking back over, because even though the theme of this newsletter is Fun, I also wanted to tell you about ‘Bakkersverdriet’. Literally translated, this means baker’s sadness. It’s something you can get at our local bakery, and Jacqueline brought it the other day. It’s large pieces of butter cookies that have snapped in half while baking when they were not supposed to, which is where the ‘sadness’ part of the name comes from. They sell it because it’s still really good, and it’s a great way to not throw out the things that have technically ‘failed’. Maybe it is because I am a relentless optimist, but I thought about the positive side of this right away: It’s not so much baker’s sadness as it is customer’s happiness, because they can get these delicious cookies for way less.

'Purple Queen', the mother of all dark reds available today

Fun Amaryllis

You might not believe me when I say this, but sometimes, we have failures as well. You cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and all that. When it comes to our stock, it means that we never really know which bulbs are going to be absolute bestsellers and which ones we might have left over. Sometimes I really don’t get it, either: my personal favourites sometimes don’t sell at all. You can probably tell where I’m going with this: our local baker has his baker’s sadness, and I want my flower bulb sadness, or customer happiness, like I just rephrased it. So I wanted to offer you bulb-sadness-customer’s-happiness-bulbs: with every Fluwel assortment-Amaryllis you order, you get one Amaryllis as a gift. I hope we can send out some of the stock we still have left, because I would love to see every Amaryllis find a happy home. I hope it brings some extra fun to your house!

So, Amaryllis Happiness. Just like we did with the last of our Peonies: with every Amaryllis you order, you get one extra Amaryllis for free. I hope you’ll have some fun with them. 

Kind regards,

Carlos van der Veek