Can I buy a flower???

When visiting the tulips in the surrounding tulip fields a few weeks ago, I reminded of the stories shared by some Dutch colleagues and some other American expats about a nearby flower auction. Having seen the tulip across it's life span - from an ugly brown bulb to a bright red blooming flower, I thought it was only appropriate to finish the journey by visiting the flower auction where it is sold prior to being part of some arrangement somewhere in the world. Advertised as the Largest Flower Auction in the world, and located 2 miles from the client that I have been driving to on a daily basis for the last year, I knew that I had to check this out. The auction starts at 6:30 in the morning, so getting up early one day, I made the trek to the Aalsmeer site along with hundreds and hundreds of truckers (now gaining the understanding of why traffic could be so bad at times and really appreciating Inga showing us the route “through the forest” for getting us to work). The auction was cool. You can see from the pictures that millions of flowers are sold here daily. From the auction, the flowers are shipped around the world. I was amazed by the quickness by which everything happens which is important to the buyers and sellers given that freshness is of the utmost importance in the flower business. Flowers come in over night, are sold in 4 hours, are out of the warehouse within the next 2 hrs and 80% are exported out of the country by the end of the day. 15 million flowers a day. How do the growers come up with 15 million flowers a day?? Must be all of those greenhouses around here. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes and when I did see it, all I wanted to do was buy some!!! So if you wondered what happened to the fields below, take a look, the answer is here....