Laundry & ironing service in Boskoop

Boskoop is first set down on paper in a charter from 1222, when Count Willem I gifted 'het Ambacht' to the Abbey of Rijnsburg. The name refers to the early landscape: a forest, a purchased woodland. From the twelfth century onwards monks and farmers began reclaiming the terrain: ditches, plots, the first orchards. The Abbey of Rijnsburg needed a back garden; Boskoop supplied the trees. Almost by accident, the oldest tree-nursery tradition in the Netherlands was born.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Boskoop farmers turned to ornamental shrubs and non-fruit trees. By the mid-seventeenth century Boskoop was a fully fledged tree-nursery centre; its location on the Gouwe made transport by barge to Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Gouda easy. In the nineteenth century the focus shifted definitively to ornamentals — and from 1813 about fifty Boskoop growers were already exporting to England, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia and even North America. The photo above — a rose exhibition in Boskoop — shows what this municipality still is: a nursery village built on bloom and flower.

Today the Boskoop nursery area covers about 1,100 hectares, with around 720 nurseries. It is one of the largest ornamental-horticulture centres in Europe, specialising in shrubs, perennials and trees for parks and gardens worldwide. In 2014 Boskoop merged with Alphen aan den Rijn and Rijnwoude; since then it falls administratively under Alphen, but the village has kept its grower identity.

Living in Boskoop, you often work in or next to a nursery. Long days, physical work, early starts. Laundry rarely fits in. We run set pickup days through the village and the nursery areas along the Gouwe. Your bag goes along in the morning, and comes back in the evening clean and ironed with the same driver. A service that fits a place that has been known for craftsmanship for eight centuries.