Eric Breed, Lisse, the Netherlands
Eric Breed was born in 1964, quite literally into a world filled with flower bulbs: Eric’s parents, Kees and (the late) Fia Breed, hold what may be the largest collection of narcissi, tulips, and colchicums in the world; famed bulb expert Wim Lemmers is his uncle; and his grandfather’s former growing fields, Zandvliet, are now part of a world-renowned park that attracts over one million visitors annually to see the flower bulb displays—we know this park as Keukenhof.
Eric received his formal horticultural training at the State Horticultural School in Lisse (alongside his classmate, friend, and eventual colleague, Carlos van der Veek). From 1983-1988, Eric’s first job in the commercial flower bulb industry was in the United States as a sales representative and buyer for van Eeden Brothers, a subsidiary of Konijnenburg & Mark (the Dutch flower bulb powerhouse that produced, among others, ‘Ice Follies’). Notable companies to whom Eric supplied bulbs were John Scheepers, Inc., van Engelen, White Flower Farm, The Daffodil Mart, and Charles Mueller Bulb Company. During his time in the States, Eric also attended his first American Daffodil Society shows in Valley Forge, Greenwich, and in New Jersey. After returning to the Netherlands, Eric worked at Hobaho from 1988-2007 as a broker connecting growers with exporters, and from 1997 onward he also managed Remarkable Tulips and Markglory breeding companies, introducing new flower bulb varieties into the world market. Since 2008, Eric has worked on a part-time basis as client service director for Fluwel, owned by Carlos van der Veek. Eric’s role at Fluwel is providing client interface for United States mail order customers like John Scheepers, Inc., van Engelen, White Flower Farm, Old House Gardens, and Colorblends, and he also provides support for Fluwel’s European webshop market.
When he’s not at Fluwel, Eric is behind the camera for his photography business, Eric Breed Tulip Pictures (www.tulippictures.eu), including free-lance photography for Visions Pictures and Photography, the largest horticultural photo stock company in the Netherlands. Eric is a chairman of the Royal General Bulb Growers (KAVB) association’s bulb committee and a chairman of the subcommittee for tulips, and he sits on the advisory board for the committee of Dutch national and European Plant Breeders’ Rights. In his free time, Eric travels to remote regions of Kazakhstan, Tibet, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and France in search of wild flower bulbs; has an integral role coordinating the annual digging and planting, maintenance, publicity, and marketing of his father’s legendary bulb collection; and has also found time to publish three books, Lost Tulips, Going Wild for Tulips, and Tulip Fields of Holland. Eric appreciates a fine single malt, has a sense of humor as colorful as the flower fields surrounding his home, and enjoys family time with his dear wife and son, Welmoed and Bastiaan. Eric will enlighten us on his travels into the wild, his family’s legendary bulb collection, and criteria the Dutch use when seeking new flower bulb varieties for the industry.
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