Tulip Time

Holland, Michigan, spends most of the year looking like what it is: a mid-sized town on Lake Macatawa with a good harbor and a long Dutch memory. Then May comes and five million tulips open at once. Tulip Time runs a little over a week, and for that stretch the streets and parks are given over to the flower more or less completely. It’s a heritage festival, but it’s also a working horticultural tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century here, which is a different thing from a costume and a parade.

The tulip took a long road to get to western Michigan. It started as a wildflower in the mountains of Central Asia, where nomadic soldiers gathered seeds and bulbs and carried them west. The flower moved through Persia and Turkey and reached the courts of Constantinople by around 1055. In the Ottoman Empire it became a mark of standing, worn in the folds of a turban, and from there it made its way to the Netherlands — where it eventually caused one of the more instructive financial manias in European history.

Albertus Van Raalte founded Holland in 1847, and the Dutch families who followed him brought bulbs in their luggage. The loamy soil here turned out to suit them. The festival itself came much later and from an unlikely source: Lida Rodgers, a biology teacher, proposed planting tulips en masse as a tribute to the town’s founders. The city put 100,000 bulbs in the ground, and the first Tulip Time was held in May 1929. Whatever Rodgers had in mind, the flower and the town have been inseparable since.

The other reason to come is Windmill Island Gardens, on 36 acres at the eastern end of Lake Macatawa that were drained out of a swamp. The centerpiece is De Zwaan — Dutch for “the swan,” or “graceful bird” — the only authentic Dutch windmill still operating in the United States. It doesn’t just stand there for photographs. It turns, and it grinds wheat into flour.

Getting it here took some doing. Willard Wichers and Carter Brown wanted a genuine windmill for Holland, but the war had destroyed enough of them that the Dutch government had banned their sale abroad. Wichers found the exception: a mill in bad enough condition that letting it go was defensible. The Netherlands sold De Zwaan for $2,800, and it became the last windmill permitted to leave the country. The documentation that came with it filled in the history — built in 1761 as a grain mill in Krommenie, standing on a raised base designed to catch the wind.

It crossed the Atlantic in October 1964 aboard the Prins Willem van Oranje, came ashore at Muskegon Harbor, and went to Windmill Island by truck. Craftsmen spent six months putting it back together. Rather than the earthen mound it had sat on before, they built a raised base to match its Krommenie configuration. The finished 125-foot mill was dedicated in April 1965.

There’s more on the island than the windmill. A street organ that Amsterdam gave Holland after the war still plays. There’s an antique carousel with hand-painted animals, replica Dutch buildings, and Little Netherlands, a scale display of Dutch life in the 1840s — the decade the founders left.