Every year in August I sit down with a number of bulb suppliers’ website pages open and start to formulate a selection of tulips for the coming spring. This has customarily been an enjoyable process, with little more on my mind than assembling a good colour selection alongside consideration of a range of flowering heights and times to ensure a longlasting display. I must admit to never having given the means of production of the bulbs much thought, although in recent years there has been a growing niggling doubt, which I have shamefully chosen not to examine too closely.

In 2021 approximately 14,400 hectares of Dutch farmland was dedicated to the production of tulip bulbs. This is where almost all commercially grown tulip bulbs come from and the majority of them are treated with a range of phosphate fertilisers, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides. All of these chemicals persist in soil and water and have a seriously damaging effects on soil-living creatures and mycorrhiza. In the case of systemic insecticides(although the use of three key neonicotinoids has been banned in the Netherlands since 2021) these can persist in the bulbs after lifting, so that bees visiting your tulip display will be directly affected and transport poisoned pollen back to the hive. Dutch studies have also shown that people living in the vicinity of commercial bulb growers have higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies with as yet unknown effects on biology and health, although in animals they are known to affect reproductive health and the respiratory system. The more you look into it the reasons to only grow organic bulbs are legion.