Pleasure

'You really enjoy your work, don't you?' I was told when I enthusiastically told a gardening friend about the tinkering in my Amaryllis greenhouse. That made me stop and think for a moment, is that true? Of course it is, not that I'm hopping around all the time; here too there are the everyday hassles, but the fact is that it is very enjoyable work. So it is absolutely true, I enjoy my work very much. An excessive amount of enjoyment even. Something new and exciting: Amaryllis 'Yellow Crown'

Every day, cooing with beautiful flowers and regularly meeting people who are also cooing with flowers or bulbs. It doesn't get any better than that! This week, I went with Vlad to Amaryllis breeder and grower Marko in the Westland to pick up a beautiful collection of very special Amaryllis bulbs that we offer in our webshop as of today under 'Vluwel Special Amaryllis'. Vlad and Marko talk about Amaryllis

When we entered his Amaryllis bulb storage cell, it was like walking into my own shed. It looked exactly the same as mine in the summer, with this small difference that with Marko you see hundreds of types of Amaryllis, where with me it is Daffodils that lie in bags and containers. Will I then talk about my Daffodils as happily, passionately and with as much pleasure as Marko does about his Amaryllis during the summer months among all my Daffodils… For the cyber lovers: Amaryllis 'Cyber ​​​​​​​​Queen'

It is fantastic to meet such people, fellow sufferers who suffer with great pleasure from the same pleasant deviation. What I also really like is that Marko and Vlad, just like me with the special Narcissus, have the same passion to make many of these very special Amaryllis bulbs available to enthusiasts. Commercially speaking, it would never make the chimney smoke, to offer only 4 or 5 bulbs of a type. But, you do make a number of enthusiasts very happy with it, and that makes you happy too. And it is also just fun to offer such beautiful Amaryllis sweets. This beauty is not officially registered, she goes under No. 97266-A

Actually, I already know for sure, but I am also curious whether it will be a success. Vlad and Marko are already talking about next year, and other Amaryllis growers have also already told us that they would like to supply a few special items next year if we continue with it. We will see how it goes, but one thing is for sure: we already like it and sincerely hope that we can make an Amaryllis lover here and there happy with this special offer. Maybe I should type 'happier' here, because I have the dark purple suspicion that the Amaryllis lover, just like other plant lovers and gardeners, is already happy anyway.

When I asked Pien – whether she also had the experience that people who garden are pleasant people – she came up with a whole story about being well grounded because they had their fingers in the mud and that made the tension run out and when she then started talking about the downstairs neighbor I said 'Pien, you write that piece in the news blog, buddy', here she comes.

To explain why I am now thinking of my downstairs neighbor, I will explain the type of house my housemate Nina and I live in: a three-storey apartment building, where each floor is a separate apartment. Nina and I live in the top house, in the middle lives a nice boy who thinks he never has any noise nuisance, even though our cats sometimes tear the whole apartment apart and knock over all the chairs, and on the ground floor lives the neighbor with her son. Because it is a flat that is built in a square, all the lower houses have a garden – quite large, for The Hague. The middle and top floors both have a balcony with a small shed and of course a washing line, which is then hung outside the balcony, above the garden of the aforementioned neighbor. When the weather is nice, I always hang the washing there, so that half the living room is not taken up by a drying rack. You probably know where I'm going with this: Nina and I first met the neighbor when we were able to pick up a pair of our (fortunately freshly washed!) socks from her garden because we are actually a bit too clumsy for a clothesline on the second floor. Clothes pegs, underwear, bedding, it has all been downstairs in that garden at some point, and our neighbor likes to work in it. Everything is neatly maintained, she has various garden sets, beautiful flower pots, and sometimes some extra decoration in the form of the laundry from the houses above her (I'm sure that the boy from the middle house has also been guilty of this). And she is very nice, so she can be added to the list of arguments in favor of the statement that people who like gardening are pleasant people.

What is also nice: from our balcony we can of course not only see the garden of our own neighbour, but also that of the rest of the people who live in 'our' square. Actually all the gardens are very nicely designed, it is of course an almost windless place, and three floors is low enough to have sun for a very long time during the day, so people like to sit outside. That is nice, because it echoes very well, so you can always sit on the balcony and listen to the family drama from the bottom left, or a lady somewhere opposite us who is not so happy with her job.

There is one exception to all these well-kept gardens: the neighbour on the bottom right. His entire garden is covered with a kind of plastic lawn, with one shed at the back, also made of plastic, from which he takes things like a table and a few chairs out, so that they can put them down on their plastic lawn and then eat outside when the weather is nice, and then they clean it up again. It is fascinating. Do you know how he keeps it clean? I didn't even know it was possible when I first saw it, but he has a special vacuum cleaner for it. A plastic lawn that you can clean with a vacuum cleaner! It exists, and he has it. But: we have also met him on the street, and he is also a nice man, so you don't necessarily have to be a gardener to be a pleasant person, I think.  

Here I go again, because even though the theme of this news blog is fun, I also wanted to talk about Baker's Sorrow. Baker's Sorrow? Yes, Baker's Sorrow. Jacqueline brought it home with her, a bag full of failed and broken butter cookies that the baker sold as baker's sorrow. Fun, a really good way to get rid of your failures. Transforming the baker's sorrow into something fun. That's what I thought right away, positive person that I am, Yes, the baker is sad, but he makes a lot of customers happy. He does them a favor. He could also have called it customer pleasure. 'Purple Queen', the mother of all dark red colours available today

Pleasure Amaryllis

You probably don't believe it, but even with us things sometimes go wrong. Where there's chopping, there will always be chips. The same goes for stock, you can never know in advance exactly how many bulbs will be ordered by customers, so sometimes you have too few bulbs of a certain type and... you guessed it, too many bulbs. Just as the baker has baker's sorrow, we have bulb sorrow. So I thought, I'm going to give away consolation bulbs. With every Amaryllis you order from the Fluwel Amaryllis range, you will receive 1 as a gift. If the stock runs out in this way, we will be comforted and we will do you a favour. No, I don't call them, like the baker does, sorrow or consolation bulbs, but pleasure bulbs. After all, I hope to do you a favour with them.

So: Amaryllis pleasure, just like we did with the last Peonies. With every purchase of an Amaryllis bulb you will receive 1 Pleasure Amaryllis from us as a gift. I hope we will give you pleasure with it.

Kind regards,

Carlos van der Veek