Netherlands Garden Tours

The Netherlands occupies a singular position in garden history. Dutch traders and botanists brought back plants from across the known world during the Golden Age, making the country a centre of horticultural innovation and plant collection. Today, the Netherlands is home to some of the world's finest bulb landscapes, great country estate gardens, and the foremost display of spring flowers anywhere in Europe.

Dutch gardens reward understanding. The formal symmetry, the canal basins, the clipped hedges and the skilled use of bulbs and perennials reflect a horticultural tradition shaped by both the flat, water-managed landscape and centuries of serious plant breeding. Our tours place all of this in context.

Our 2027 Netherlands Garden Tours

For 2027, our Netherlands programme offers two distinct garden journeys, both now open for booking: a spring tour built around Keukenhof, the bulb fields and the Bloemencorso Flower Parade, and a late-summer tour through the naturalistic gardens of the Dutch Wave, from Piet Oudolf's planting at Singer Laren and Vlinderhof to the experimental gardens of Mien Ruys.

Keukenhof

Keukenhof, near Lisse in the heart of the Bollenstreek, is the world's largest flower garden and one of the great horticultural spectacles of spring. Open for just eight weeks each year, it displays over seven million bulbs — tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, alliums and much else — across 32 hectares of landscaped parkland. For garden travellers, it is an essential reference point for what skilled bulb cultivation can achieve at scale.

The Bollenstreek

The bulb-growing region of North and South Holland stretches from Haarlem to Leiden and is best experienced in April, when the fields are laid out in broad horizontal bands of colour — yellow, red, pink, purple and white — against the flat Dutch landscape and wide sky. The combination of the flower fields, the historic towns of Leiden and Haarlem, and the traditional windmills of the Kinderdijk makes this one of the most distinctively Dutch journeys in horticulture.

Dutch Country Estates

The Netherlands contains a remarkable concentration of country estate gardens, many dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Het Loo, the former royal palace near Apeldoorn, has a fully restored seventeenth-century formal garden of exceptional quality. Huis Doorn, Beeckestijn and De Keukenhof estate (distinct from the public garden) offer further layers of Dutch garden-making history. Our tours visit the most significant and least-visited combination of these estates.

Amsterdam and the Canal Gardens

Amsterdam's canal houses are famous for their architecture, but the city also contains a number of exceptional public and private gardens. The Hortus Botanicus, founded in 1638 as one of the world's oldest botanical gardens, remains a working research collection with a remarkable range of historic plants. The Museum Van Loon garden, hidden behind a canal house on the Keizersgracht, is a rare example of a seventeenth-century formal Amsterdam garden. Both reward a careful visit.

When to visit

The Netherlands has two great garden seasons. Mid-April to mid-May is the window for bulbs: Keukenhof is open from late March to mid-May, and the tulip fields peak in the second half of April, which is when our Holland spring tour travels. Late summer is the season of the Dutch Wave, when perennials and grasses reach their full height and the first seedheads form; our Dutch Wave tour visits in early September. See Best Time to Visit Dutch Wave Gardens and Dutch Tulip Season.

Our Netherlands garden tours

All our Netherlands tours are small-group and escorted, with an expert garden-specialist tour leader throughout. Groups are typically 15–20 guests. Accommodation is in carefully selected hotels close to the gardens on the programme.

Netherlands garden profiles

Detailed guides to the gardens on our Netherlands programmes — what makes them significant, what to look for and why they are worth including in a specialist garden tour.

• Keukenhof Gardens — the great spring bulb display near Lisse
• JP Thijssepark — the pioneering naturalistic heempark at Amstelveen
• Vlinderhof — Piet Oudolf's public perennial garden in Utrecht
• Palace Het Loo — the restored baroque palace garden at Apeldoorn
• Kasteel Twickel — a great moated estate in the eastern Netherlands
• De Wiersse — a celebrated private garden near Vorden
• Kröller-Müller Sculpture Garden — art, landscape and planting in the Hoge Veluwe

The Dutch Wave: further reading

Planning guides and design articles for the naturalistic planting movement behind our Dutch Wave Gardens Tour 2027.

• What Is the Dutch Wave?
• Piet Oudolf and Naturalistic Planting
• Mien Ruys and Modern Dutch Garden Design
• Best Time to Visit Dutch Wave Gardens