Tulips in the Boland

A nursery at Le Domaine just outside Rawsonville is dedicated to growing these beautiful blooms

- By Marie Brody

Growing more than four million tulips annually in South Africa when these bulbs actually prefer a cold climate is not for the faint-hearted.

But this is what Adriaan van Wyk and his team are doing with great success as part of the international company Bloomia. After a visit to the Netherlands, Adriaan's mom Retha Alberts and her late husband Kobus decided that they wanted to grow tulips on their smallholding in Rawsonville (read about this beautiful farm garden on page 100). In 2009, they started assembling a greenhouse that they had imported from the Netherlands.

With the rest of the infrastructure such as the cooling system, refrigeration rooms and pumps - all supplied locally – in place, the first consignment of tulip bulbs was ordered from the Netherlands.

I worked as a combat officer on submarines in the navy before joining Kobus to help with the construction of the greenhouse, says Adriaan. “After that, I worked for a tulip grower in America for five weeks to learn more about these bulbs, as none of us had any knowledge about plants. We started small and made changes and improvements as we went along.

Dutch ties

The initial learning curve was extremely steep. Kobus died 18 months into the project after a short illness. Suddenly, Adriaan had to go it alone. In addition, a winter storm that hit soon after he'd invested a large sum of money in the business

It plunged us into a financial crisis and we were on the verge of insolvency, he recalls. But I wasn't about to give up. We decided to approach Bloomia - the current Dutch owners - who had at that stage already supplied us with bulbs, with the view of becoming part of the group.