Greenhouses of the Historische Tuin Aalsmeer (historic horticultural garden)

Around 1970 the Stichting Oud Aalsmeer was founded to look after the town's history, with the aim of opening a museum. Some of its board members and a few growers were already worried by the rapid conversion of old nurseries into marinas or industrial sites: along the Uiterweg, the masts of sailing boats were already taking the place of nursery chimneys. The idea of an open-air museum of horticulture took hold.

When part of the Dahlia Maarse nursery at Uiterweg 32 came up for sale, the initiators approached its owner, Willem Maarse, who ran it with his two sisters and agreed to cooperate. The municipality bought the land on 4 February 1975, and the Stichting Historische Tuin Aalsmeer was set up in January 1978 as part of the municipal organisation. The garden opened to the public in May 1982. In 1995 the foundation became independent and took the staff onto its own payroll.

After the purchase the nursery's old buildings were restored, and several characteristic structures were reconstructed, some by volunteers and others by a contractor, among them the flower barn with its 'kruip-in' lean-to and the timber auction building of 1999. The nineteenth-century farmhouse, a listed national monument, now houses a local history centre.

The garden's greenhouses belong to the tradition of florists' glasshouses that made Aalsmeer one of the centres of growing under glass in the Netherlands; the reference book Kassen in Nederland singles out the garden as the place where these houses make the development of flower growing south of Amsterdam visible.

The oldest is a pot-plant house of 1935 of the 'stijlenkas' or post type. A 'spantenkas', a wide-span house ('breedkapkas') with crops grown in the ground, was built in 1965 by the firm CTAV, and a CTAV builder's plate dated 1960 is fixed to the rose house. Together with the Venlo-type 'warenhuis', the wide-span house was one of the two models on which the great Dutch glasshouse complexes were based.

The route also includes a lean-to or 'kruip-in' attached to the flower barn and an exhibition space set up inside a greenhouse. Around them stand reconstructed working buildings, such as the mat shed and the coke store, the latter a reminder of how the houses were heated.

The living collection spans the whole of Aalsmeer's horticultural history, from the shrubs and avenue trees of the first nurseries around 1650 to the cyclamen and cut roses grown around 1950. Its common thread is the transition from tree nursery to flower growing.

It includes some 150 rose cultivars, shown both under glass and outdoors, 90 cultivars of apple and pear, 65 varieties of lilac, 50 Pelargonium cultivars and around 60 dahlias, together with ornamental shrubs, clipped box and yew, climbers including clematis, and bedding and pot plants. Forced shrubs such as lilac and Viburnum are also grown, and one pear tree carries thirteen grafted varieties. In all, about a thousand cultivars are sown, struck from cuttings, budded, grafted or layered every year.

The garden lies by the water on the Praamplein, a short walk from the centre of Aalsmeer, and is open from April to mid-October. A path of about 450 metres travels back in time from the crops of the 1960s to those of the eighteenth century; allow one to two hours including the history centre in the farmhouse's former cowshed, which holds temporary exhibitions. The auction building keeps a 1930s auction clock from the former Bloemenlust flower auction. A walk along the Uiterweg, once the heart of Aalsmeer's nurseries, makes a fitting extension to the visit.