Forty years after first encountering Keukenhof as a landscape architecture student, Mark Hieber finally experienced the iconic garden in person. A visit on a Backroads Bike Tour brought new perspective to a landscape he had long admired.
Long before visiting the Netherlands on Backroads’ Netherlands & Belgium Bike Tour, Mark Hieber studied the famous garden as a landscape architecture student. The images stayed with him: sweeping curves, bold blocks of color and ribbons of tulips that shaped his eye as a designer long before he saw them in person.
A Landscape That Sticks with You
As a student, Keukenhof was not just another famous garden. It was the garden.
“As one of the most famous gardens in the world, it was part of our coursework,” Mark says. “I was wowed by the lavish display of color and patterns, the artistry of it. But what really struck me was how ephemeral it is. It only exists like that for about eight weeks a year.”
That fleeting quality is part of what makes Keukenhof unusual. Each year, gardeners plant some seven million bulbs across the 32-hectare park, using more than 1,600 varieties. When the season ends, the bulbs are removed and the process begins again. The planting design changes from year to year, with varieties chosen to keep different parts of the garden blooming throughout its short spring season.
Underneath that constantly changing display is a much older landscape. Keukenhof’s English landscape-style park dates to 1857, when landscape architects Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher designed the grounds around Keukenhof Castle. Its mature trees, winding paths, ponds and sweeping views still provide the framework for the explosion of color that arrives each spring.
For Mark, the contrast was fascinating: the underlying landscape stayed put while the flower displays changed every year.
The Moment It Became Real
Decades after first encountering Keukenhof in textbooks, Mark finally arrived in person.
“I was just so happy,” he says. “Happy to finally see, in person, this landscape gem I had first encountered in textbooks.”
There was plenty to take in. Keukenhof has 15 kilometers of walking paths winding through mature trees and gardens that range from broad, naturalistic sweeps to more formal displays. Tulips may get top billing, but daffodils, hyacinths and other bulbs fill out the landscape, appearing in dense blocks, ribbons and patterns.
Walking through Keukenhof brought Mark back to the photographs and drawings he had studied decades earlier. In person, he could finally understand the garden’s scale, walk its curves and sight lines and see how one planting led into another.
A River of Color
One image in particular had stayed with Mark since college: a mass of blooming bulbs arranged like a ribbon flowing across the landscape.
“There’s a planting there that looks like a river of color,” he says. “That’s the image I remembered most clearly from my studies. Seeing it in person, it felt like stepping directly into that memory.”
For a second, the garden Mark remembered and the one in front of him overlapped.
Seeing It with New Eyes
In the years between studying Keukenhof and finally visiting it, Mark had spent a career designing parks and urban open spaces of his own. That experience changed what he noticed.
“What impresses me most now is the power of landscapes to bring people together,” he says. “There were people from all over the world there, connecting through the shared experience of the garden.”
He noticed it in small moments: people stopping for photographs, leaning closer to examine a flower or simply standing together in front of the same burst of color.
“The affinity people have for plants, for designed landscapes, is universal,” he says. “As someone who designs parks and urban open spaces, seeing that kind of joy and connection is incredibly rewarding.”
Beyond the Garden
Keukenhof was one highlight of a six-day journey through the Netherlands and Belgium with Backroads. The trip traces a route from the countryside outside Amsterdam to Bruges, following the region’s extensive bike paths past windmills, canals, polders and villages, with stops in places like The Hague, Gouda and Kinderdijk along the way.
For Mark, experiencing these landscapes by bike was part of what made the trip so memorable.
“Experiencing these landscapes at a bicycling pace made the trip so rewarding,” he says. “You notice more: the sights, the sounds, the smells. You are really in it, instead of just passing through.”
At that pace, the landscape revealed itself gradually. Keukenhof may have been the garden Mark had waited decades to see, but the riding gave him a chance to experience the larger Dutch landscape around it as well.
Dreams on Their Own Timeline
Forty years is a long time to carry a place in your imagination.
“It definitely reinforced my desire to see more places around the world,” Mark says. “Some dreams take time, but that does not make them any less meaningful when they finally happen.”
Forty years after first discovering Keukenhof in a classroom, Mark finally walked its winding paths and saw that river of color for himself. For decades, he knew the garden through photographs, drawings and memory.
Now he knows what it feels like to be there.
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