TRAVELING IN STYLE : Correspondents’ Choice : HOW DO YOU KNOW IT’S SPRING?

IN HOLLAND

IN WINTER, THE FIELDS IN LISSE, THE NETHERLANDS, ARE COLORLESS--ACRE after acre of flat, bare earth covered by straw and, on especially cold mornings, by an eerie white frost. But come March they don’t look like that: Green shoots from billions of bulbs that were beneath that protective covering of straw will start popping up. Soon they will blossom into a vast patchwork of dazzling color in one of the world’s great displays of spring: the Dutch tulip fields.

At the vortex of this whirlpool of color is the Keukenhof, a 70-acre garden where the best growers display their best flowers, tulips and otherwise. About 6 million bulbs are planted here, three deep, so that when the early bloomers--crocuses, daffodils and some varieties of tulip--are spent, another wave is ready to follow, and then another. Familiar as the scene has become to the Dutch, the local citizenry still finds this unmistakable signal of spring no less than thrilling: Of the nearly 1 million visitors the Keukenhof attracts each year, fully one-third will be from Holland.

The Keukenhof (Dutch for “kitchen garden” and so called because a 15th-Century countess used the vegetables and herbs grown here in her castle’s kitchen) will be open to the public this year from March 25 to May 23. Lisse is between Haarlem and Leiden, a short drive from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague.