Leiden's Botanical Gardens

Leiden's Botanical Gardens are just across the canal from the University library.  As I was eating lunch on the other side, I could see clumps of snowdrops growing along the water's edge, and so I decided to walk over and take a look.  I was happy to find out that the "museum card" I bought two weeks ago to get free admission to about 300 museums in the Netherlands applies to the Botanical Gardens, too!

The Dutch have been sea-faring traders for centuries, and in 1590, these Botanical Gardens displayed rare flowers and trees brought back from their voyages.  The first tulips in the Netherlands bloomed here--back then one bulb from Turkey cost several years' salary!  Understandably, in Dutch seventeenth-century still lifes, tulips are frequently a symbol for the vanity and worldly glory that will one day fade like a cut flower ...

These yellow ground flowers were blooming in the grass and among the dead branches from last year's shrubs.

Purple crocus--the first flowers of the year.  Sometimes they bloom in the snow.

Snowdrops growing near the canal.  There were several different kinds of ducks swimming and ducking under the water.

There is a small  Japanese garden dedicated to Mr. van Siebold, who spent many years living in Japan, studying its culture, and collecting plant species to take back to Holland during the nineteenth century.  At that time, the Dutch traders were among the only people allowed into Japan.  The government had an unbelievably strict isolationist policy, enforced to a certain degree by the stormy Sea of Japan that protects the islands.  For some reason, the shogun made a special exception for the Dutch.

There are quite a few plants in the gardens that van Siebold himself carried back from Japan nearly two hundred years ago.  Most of them are trees, but I also saw "mountain wisteria" vines.  They are all marked with plaques written in Japanese.

This is van Siebold's Japanese garden.

And ... completely unrelated to the Botanical Gardens, here is my grocery shopping from a few days ago!  Europe has such fabulous chocolate--I particularly like the butter cookies with dark chocolate on top.  In fact I nearly always have a box of them in my backpack.  Only two and a half Euros for this grocery store trip!