Interesting tulip facts
Did you know that in 2016 it is expected to sell nearly 2 billion individual tulips through the Dutch Flower Auction? When we put these tulips all in one long line this will take you to the moon and back and than just have a lot more distance left! That is a lot of tulips! Read on for more interesting tulip facts.
Every year I learn more and more about the tulips in Holland. Recently I learned that one out of six flowers sold at the Dutch flower auction is a tulip (17%).
These tulips are provided by the >500 tulip growers in the Netherlands; and they are breeding more than two million tulips on average. All these tulips cover more than 10.000 hectares of land, that is app. 10.000 baseball fields or 8200 soccer fields or a little over 29 times the size of Central Park in New York filled with tulip bulbs only.
In 2015 a total of 926 different tulip cultivars were supplied via the flower auction. 25 years ago this was “only” 300 different tulips. These tulips were the most popular at the auction: Strong Gold, Leen vd Mark, Purple Prince, Debutante, Purple Flag, Candy Prince, Seadov, Silver Dollar, Jan Rochelle and Ile de France.
There are a large number of tulips named after famous people. For example, the following persons are en tulip: Katie Melua, Jan Smit, Princess Margriet, Prince Willem Alexander, Abba, Jamai, Ronaldo, Fats Domino, Armani, Pink Floyd, Rambo, Hilary Clinton and Paul McCartney.
Source: Tulpendag