A dash of mortality sprinkled among colourful fields of tulips

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This article was published 20/07/2024 (757 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In April, I was fortunate enough to be able to check off a major bucket-list item for me: see the tulips in the Netherlands.

Like wooden clogs, windmills and Miffy, the minimalist white bunny created by Dutch artist/children’s book author Dick Bruna, tulips are deeply embedded in the iconography of the Netherlands. They are not a native species but rather a coveted 17th-century import from the Ottoman Empire that ushered in “tulip mania,” which is now a business phrase to describe large economic bubbles and bursts.

As a spring baby, I have always loved tulips. For me, they symbolize renewal and birth, the beginnings of things.

And so, in mid-April — which is peak tulip season — I made the trip to Keukenhof, one of the largest flower gardens in the world, with one of my oldest friends. It’s about a 35-minute bus ride from Amsterdam and is only open for eight short glorious weeks when the tulips burst into bloom.

I understand why Dutch people in the 1600s went wild for these flowers. These tulips made me gasp. A riot of colour in more varieties than I knew existed. The outlying tulip fields were so densely saturated that it looked as though giant flags were spread out on the ground.

There was just one issue with my visit: the weather was terrible. Comically, tragically terrible. Constant, pouring rain accompanied by a cold, whipping wind that turned umbrellas inside out.

All of us at the gardens that day were silently commiserating via nods and smiles; we were all in this together.

This wasn’t how I imagined my Keukenhof experience. I imagined wearing an adorable outfit and taking an obnoxious number of photos of myself biking, Dutchly, among the beautiful tulips.

Instead, my mascara was running, my hair was wild, and I was bundled into a shapeless green rain jacket. The final indignity: I tried to take a cute photo posed behind a wheelbarrow and it just looked like I worked there.

This is why I don’t usually go in for bucket lists, especially ones that include items involving expense and travel. I don’t know when — or even if — I’ll ever be back to Keukenhof during those precious few weeks in April. There is a certain “this is it, now or never” quality about these experiences, which puts undue pressure on those experiences to be perfect.

That, and bucket lists also make you think about dying.

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The next day, we went to the Rijksmuseum, a national gallery dedicated to Dutch arts and history in Amsterdam. After throwing elbows to get a closer look at Vermeer’s The Milkmaid — which seems to be their Mona Lisa in terms of drawing a crowd — I went to explore some paintings from one of my favourite art movements, Dutch still life.

Look closely at the lush bowls of fruit or the insouciant bouquets of flowers and you’ll notice there’s always a bit of death in a Dutch still life. Decay or rot in the form of wilting petals, moldering citrus peels, or, in the not-so-subtle case of a 1634 painting by Jacob Marrel, a belly-up frog. As a product of the Dutch Golden Age, Marrel specialized in “portraits” of tulips in various stages of bloom and death; he was a fan, too.

Like the bucket list, the Dutch still lifes will make you consider your own mortality, the impermanence of life and beauty. The tulips will wither and die, and one day so will we. (Incidentally, “the tulips will wither and die, and one day so will we,” sounds like it could be a Dutch expression.)

So, we try to capture these fleeting experiences, these fleeting moments of life and beauty — whether by oil paint or iPhone photo — so we can somehow preserve them, to save them, to make them last a little longer.

The other thing about life is that sometimes it rains. Sometimes things don’t turn out as you imagined, but they will still be beautiful. As the Dutch man who loaded us sodden tourists onto the bus said of the rain with a shrug, “Oh well. The tulips will be happy.”

And when I look at my many photos of Keukenhof, all I see is an endless expanse of those happy tulips at the peak of their short season, nourished by the rain. All I see is evidence of how glad I was to just be there, in that moment, with one of my oldest friends.

All I see is life.

A previous version of this column originally ran in the newsletter NEXT.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com