Good Morning gardeners! Frankie can’t be with us today. She wrote me a few days ago saying she had some unexpected personal matters that would make her unable to host the Garden Blog today. She asked me to stand in, and I told her I’d be glad to help out. Some of us, myself included, look forward to participating most Saturday mornings. If the diary didn’t appear, who knows how many people would be hitting refresh on their browsers repeatedly, perhaps for an hour or more. That won't happen today thanks to Frankie's planning.
I intended to post some photos of my trip to Holland this week so I will do it here in the body of the diary. Earlier in July, we visited my wife’s cousin in Holland. I have some garden-related pics below the fold.
My wife’s cousin lives in Den Haag, aka The Hague. One of the first places we visited was the Peace Palace. How is that for a statement about a county’s ideals? Here is a photo of the Peace Palace and its garden. The sign in the garden reads “May peace prevail on earth.”
The Peace Palace has an interesting history.
The foundation of the Peace Palace marks a pivotal point between two centuries. At the end of the 19th century, the idea of world peace was blooming as never before. Europe and America had hundreds of active peace organisations, some of them with millions of members. This huge international peace movement was fed by high-profile writers and pacifists such as Leo Tolstoi (Russia), Bertha von Suttner (Austria) and Jean Bloch, a French banker who worked for six long years on a monumental description of "The Horrors of War". A Swiss organisation, the Société de la Paix, introduced the word pacifism into the world. At the dawn of the 20th century however, expectations had toned down considerably. One year after the festive opening of the Peace Palace in 1913, the First World War broke out.
The Peace Palace is also the home of the world court, a court that deals with disputes between nations.
At about the same time we arrived, the 48th International Rose Competition was held in a park in the Hague. The park contains 350 species of roses from all over the world. Join me as we view the red rose district (among other colors):
This was our favorite, but it didn’t win. Here is a link to de winnaars.
The first thoughts that came to mind prior to my visit to Holland were wooden shoes, windmills, and tulips. We drove for more than an hour in search of Keukenhof Gardens, a place known for its tulips. This 70 acre garden has a windmill at one end, and features 7 million tulip bulbs. After driving lost for a while, we finally found the place. But we discovered to our chagrin that the garden is closed. The garden features flowers other than tulips, but it is only open for two months during the tulip season.
I did capture an image of tulips in Madurodam Park, a miniature city located in a garden. It has scale models of most landmarks in the Netherlands. The tulips in my photo are less than an inch tall (you can see life-size people walking in the upper left of the image). The tulips are fake but the other bushes in the image are real.
Even though I didn’t get to see the real tulips, I had a great time. My wife's cousin and her husband were perfect hosts. I have added cycling, cheese, modern wind-power generators, peace and herring to my stereotypical images of Holland. The herring are eaten raw with chopped onions. As seen in the image below, it’s customary to hold a plate in one hand and the fish in the other. Next, one tilts their head back to take in the fish, head-side first. I could adopt a lot of habits from this “Old Europe” nation, but that isn’t likely one of them.