I bought a bunch of 10 tulips for $6.99 the other day and stuck them on my desk. One day, the buds were tight and pale, the next about the size of a plum and similar in color. They weren't the slinky, pastel French tulips that high-end florists coo over, but they lifted my spirits, lasted for days and brought a glimpse of spring.
I picked them up at a grocery story a couple of blocks from the office. Nothing strange about that, but here's the weird thing: I may well have seen the same bunch being grown and gathered a few days earlier in an enormous greenhouse just outside Culpeper, Va. I say "may" because one bunch was hard to see amid something like 1 million tulips in hydroponic cultivation at the glazed quarters of a company called Fresh Tulips USA, in Stevensburg. Here, hiding in plain sight, is one of the largest tulip factories in the world, and, yes, I did feel a bit like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory as a Dutchman named Coen Haakman put on the hat of Willy Wonka. Figuratively.
It probably helps to be Dutch to undertake an enterprise that involves the mass production of the tulip. It's in the blood: Greenhouse growers in the Netherlands raise 1.5 billion cut tulips a year, even if fewer of those blooms today are making it to the American marketplace.
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