The Arne Quinze Tulip

Belgian artist Arne Quinze
Arne Quinze is a Belgian contemporary artist, painter and sculptor. His work involves everything from small drawings and paintings, medium-sized sculptures to massive installations. Quinze was born in Belgium in 1971 and currently lives and works in Sint-Martens-Latem, a town near the Belgian city of Ghent. With his artworks all over the world, Arne Quinze wants to encourage the viewer to embrace nature again and to allow its diversity and all its colour into their lives.

For Arne Quinze, nature has been his inexhaustible source of inspiration since childhood. Even though he has travelled all over the world, his own garden with 50 000 flowers is for him a wonderful and special place that gives him a tangible feeling of beauty and tranquility. The pure feeling that his wild flower garden gives him is a living moment that he wants to capture. Before Arne Quinze begins to paint, he makes a long, intriguing and unpredictable journey through his self-planted garden, and with that gut feeling he sets to work on his artworks. The artist tries to capture on his canvas, sculpture or installation the foliage journey and the wonder he experiences in his transforming garden. 

Not only the colour and splendour of nature is unique to the artist, but also the beauty in the decay of nature, of its wild flowers. The inventive, rebellious and changing garden is Arne Quinze's lab and this all four seasons of the year.

Origin of the Arne Quinze Tulip
The Arne Quinze Tulip is a hybrid with Flower Power as its basis.
This Flower Power has as ancestor the Holland Happening. The Holland Happening comes from Apeldoorn, this place was crucial for the breeding of tulips in 1900. Many of today's marketable tulips originated from these tulips. 

Flower Power                                                                                    Holland Happening 

In the autumn of 2021, 3m³ of Arne Quinze tulips were planted, this is good for about 1000m². This planting material will, after a good harvest, deliver about five to ten thousand saleable bulbs together with new planting material for further cultivation and propagation of the species. Next year, after a good harvest, about 1300 m² of planting material can be planted.

The first seed of the Arne Quinze tulip was sown in the early 2000s and now, twenty years later, we have the first saleable bulbs.

Thanks to G. Vanacker & S. Pennings
Geert Vanacker, second generation of Bloembollen Vanacker, named this tulip after Arne in consultation with Simon Pennings, owner of W.A.M. Pennings & Tulip Experience.

The Arne Quinze Tulip Ceremony on 29 April at 4 pm
at Tulip Experience Amsterdam
Delfweg 37, 2211 VK Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands
Register here: www.vanacker.be/arnequinze