Chongming Love

Not everyone will know who, what or where Chongming is, I didn't know myself either. All I knew about this beautiful Tulip was that all the available bulbs went to China every year to be planted in a park. What turns out; Chongming is a large island at the mouth of the Yangtze River just north of the city of Shanghai.

In a large park on this green island, hundreds of thousands of tulips are planted every year, almost like Keukenhof, for the many inhabitants of the city. Do they just do that in China, plant tulips for the inhabitants? Yes, they just do that. The Chinese try to make the cities as beautiful as possible for their many inhabitants.

I myself have sold Lilies and other flower bulbs a long time ago to the green department of the city of Shenzhen, a very large city just next to Hong Kong. The official I was dealing with explained it to me. He said that it was a huge challenge for the Chinese government to please the residents of the city.

In a city like Shenzhen, almost 10,000,000 people live, he continued, and everyone must have their own home. Look around you and see how close people live on, under and above each other. All small homes with very little room to move and no garden. As a government, we do our best to make up for the limited living space by making the city with all its public spaces as beautiful as possible. We cannot offer everyone a garden, but what we can do is make the city as beautiful as possible by brightening it up with flowers and greenery. And it helps, it turns out that people like to live in cities with lots of public greenery and flowery parks.

This Tulip, Chongming Love is planted in huge numbers every year in a park on the island of Chongming in Shanghai. But after years of asking, grower Heemskerk from Lisse also sold a few to us, I am incredibly happy with them.

Chongming Love is really worth it. An excellent garden tulip, large and strong with a beautiful chalk colour palette that you rarely see in tulips. If you think this is a beautiful tulip, also look at her sister Kunyun , she is just as beautiful if not even more beautiful.