Flowers and Friends in Veldhoven

I do work occasionally :)  In fact, I met my only local friend at Honeywell.  His name is Rene Overbeeke and he has been very kind to help Jeff and me adjust to our new home.  He and his wife, Nancy, came over to meet the Reeds and then their two kids, Aniek and Marijn came over to help us practice Dutch. 

Perhaps my favorite thing about Veldhoven so far are the flowers!  Rene bought a membership for us to the local community flower garden.  For a mere 7 Euro you can get a giant bouquet of flowers every Saturday from mid August until the first frost!  That means fresh flowers every week for two full months!  They give you so many that I had a hard time finding space for them all each week.


The flower is bigger than this little girl's head!  The growers seem to be retired for the most part.  They tend the garden year round and all you have to do is point to the type that you want and they cut a beautiful armful of flowers for you. 

I am always amazed at what they throw out also!  The flowers are just so plentiful that there is no reason to keep the less than perfect ones.

The great reward for all of that hard work!  After picking out the purple ones below someone stopped me as I was leaving and insisted that I take the yellow ones as well.  I think he was telling me that they go perfectly together, which is true.  You can't see in the picture, but the purple ones have a slight yellow tint in the center.

This was really interesting.  These flowers are Dahlias by the way.  Since they have such full and heavy blooms they grow them through metal netting and bag the blooms to avoid rain damage.  This may have been an experiement since I only saw one plot like this?  Can you imagine, all these great pictures and I only took the camera out on one Saturday.  I did join a second garden club to donate to the cause as much as anything.  When I joined they told me that I did have such a garden in Veldhoven as well.  Of course, I knew this, but was only a mile from our loft.  If I wasn't in Veldhoven, where the heck was I?  Turns out these garden clubs are quite competitive!