By Branko Collin

Last Wednesday famous cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants got a tulip named after him in the Keukenhof flower garden. Under the watchful of eye of many a young fan and the great big yellow sponge himself, the flower got baptized with perfectly good champagne by Nickelodeon presenter Patrick Martens.

It took grower Jan Ligthart from Breezand 18 years to develop the tulip, writes De Telegraaf (Dutch). Presumably that time was not spent exclusively on this new tulip, as many companies have already paid the man to do the same. Ligthart told the paper it would take four years for the bulbs to arrive in Dutch stores: “The first bulbs are for the US, because they pay better abroad. It’s as simple as that.”

(Photo of a totally unrelated yellow tulip by Hisa Fujimoto, some rights reserved.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 9:13 am and is filed under Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.