Tourists are being ripped off at Amsterdam’s famous flower market, with just 1 percent of all bulbs sold at the floating bazaar ever producing a blossom, investigators said yesterday.
A probe commissioned by the Dutch capital’s municipality and tulip growers also found that often only one flower resembled the pictures on the packaging, and that there were fewer bulbs than advertised.
“The probe showed that there is chronic deception of consumers,” the Royal General Bulb Growers’ Association (KAVB) said.
“Millions of tourists and day-trippers are being duped,” KAVB chairman Rene le Clercq said in a statement.
The Amsterdam flower market is one of the city’s most famous landmarks and dates from about 1862, when flower sellers sailed their barges up the Amstel River and moored them in the “Singel” to sell their goods.
Its fame inspired the popular song Tulips From Amsterdam, best known for a 1958 version by British entertainer Max Bygraves.
Today the market comprises a number of fixed barges with little greenhouses on top. Vendors not only sell tulip bulbs, but also narcissus, snowdrops, carnations, violets, peonies and orchids.
Investigators found a similar problem along the so-called “flower bulb boulevard” in Lisse, a bulb-field town south of Amsterdam where the famous Keukenhof gardens are also situated.
Of the bulbs bought from the rows of stalls along a main road in Lisse, only 2 percent ever bloomed, the KAVB said.
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