Washout: wettest May on record puts dampener on Van Gogh tribute

It should have been a colourful tribute to one of Vincent van Gogh’s best known works and a celebration of the arrival of summer – but it reckoned without the treacherous Dutch weather.

Two weeks ago workers, volunteers and schoolchildren painstakingly sowed 50,000 sunflower and dahlia seeds by hand that would grow into a giant living replica of one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings.

The seeds had to be carefully planted at the exact height and distance to ensure they resembled the artwork as closely as possible. Organisers threw a net across the field to stop mice and rabbits nibbling away at the sculpture, but they could do nothing about the threat from the sky.

Four weeks before the field in Etten-Leur should have opened to the public, the wettest May on record has turned the ground into a saturated brown mass.

“The sunflowers should have been about 10-15 centimetres high by this point, but unfortunately it’s all been soaked, rotten and washed away,” project leader Pierre van Damme told Omroep Brabant.

The attraction was due to be ready on July 1 as an extension of the Van Gogh National Park, which was opened four years ago in Noord-Brabant to celebrate Van Gogh’s legacy in the landscape where he grew up and began his artistic career.

“The contours and the paths with the wood chippings are still intact, thank God, but the seeds have been lost, including the 500 dahlias that were planted,” said Van Damme.

Yet he remains hopeful of salvaging the 7,000 m2 sculpture with a new batch of seeds now that the weather forecast looks more benign.

“We’re not giving up,” he said. “Vincent never gave up and we’re not giving up either. We are carrying on in the full conviction that it will come good.”