Windmill Island Gardens really is the face of Holland, Michigan. Maintaining the centuries-old windmill to ensuring that the tulips and other plants always look pristine is the challenge for Matt Helmus and his team.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The Different Events That Take Place in the Windmill Island Gardens
• Managing the Pressure and Expectations of the Windmill Island Gardens with Visitors
• Working with the Dutch in the Netherlands to Maintain The Proper Dutch Heritage

Links:

Windmill Island Website

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: And the best compliment we can get

is when people say, you know, really felt like a little slice of home.

It looked kind of like the Netherlands here, the way you have the garden set

up and the canals and the windmill.

And I think they appreciate, as do we, that we're not, again,

we're not trying to do it as a kitche thing, as a tourist trap.

We want to give ' em a little bit broader picture of the Netherlands

as well as Holland, Michigan.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Ordinary

People, Extraordinary Things.

I'm your host, Cliff DuVernois.

Today we are continuing our exploration of the city of Holland.

And I am speaking with the Windmill Island Gardens Development

Manager for the City of Holland.

Cuz it's hard not to think about Holland without thinking

about the Windmill Garden.

So today's guest, Matt Helmus, is gonna share with us a brief history

of the place and, Matt, how are you?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: I'm doing great, Cliff.

It's a great day.

thanks for taking time to talk with us today.

Tell us a little bit about where you're from and where you.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: I'm a native boy here from West Michigan.

I grew up, here in Grand Rapids in Jenison, just down

the road in Ottawa County.

So not too far from Holland.

Had never really ventured here a whole lot, especially during tulip time.

I had one of those dads who said, we'll take, we'll go there 50 weeks

out of the year, but those two weeks of Tulip Time, we're not gonna visit.

So close enough to know what's going on, but far enough to not go all the time.

Where did you go to college?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: I went up to the center of the

state, up to Alma College and got my undergrad there in history.

And then came back to West Michigan for a master's at Grand

Valley in Public Administration.

So how did you make the leap from a degree in

history to working for the city?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Well, it was one of those openings I saw.

I had just finished up a master's degree, started looking around

for jobs and saw this opening at Wind Island Gardens in Holland.

And I grew up as a, a Dutch kid locally.

A lot of my family way back had come from the Netherlands.

I love history.

Just finished degree in Public Administration, so non-profit

or MUN municipal work.

And when I saw this opening, my wife kinda looked at me and said

it's like you couldn't have written a better job description for me.

The Dutch stuff, the history stuff, the public administration thing.

So it was just an absolute godsend of a job.

that's really interesting.

What made you think that you were, because it's like quite a leap from

having a degree in history to all of a sudden now having to maintain one

of the key central points that people think of when they think about Holland.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: It is, it's really the

focal point of Holland.

It was in the city logo for years and still in there.

People think about the windmill.

They come to Holland and they say, where's your Dutch stuff?

And we point 'em to, our windmill, we point 'em to

wooden shoes, things like that.

Tulip Festival.

So it really, I'd gotten enough management experience and they were really looking to

tighten up the administration down there.

We'll talk a little bit about, I'm sure.

Financially, it wasn't in the best of straits.

Dutch people are known for being, pretty good, pretty frugal, good with money.

So we've really tightened things up over the years.

So with some of the experience I've had there, really paid off at the island.

What I'd like to do is take a step back in

time to how the Windmill Island Gardens, even came into, existence.

And from what I was researching online, this was something that was started back

in the fifties or sixties timeframe.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah.

Back in the forties, fifties, folks around town, some of the city fathers

were banding about the idea of, how do we show off the Dutch heritage?

At that time, the city had been around for about a hundred years,

was still pretty Dutch heavy.

And you had tourists coming into town saying, You know what,

again, where's that Dutch stuff?

What's Holland, Michigan all about?

So they got the idea to get, something, an area or a park

or something to send folks to.

And obviously being Dutch, the idea was what if we could get one of these

windmills from the Netherlands, get the, get it over here and show it off?

So they reached out, to some places in the Netherlands to the Dutch

government, the Dutch Mill Society.

And that was the point really, when people were just beginning

to value their heritage items.

So in the Netherlands, they had a law that said you were not allowed to, take these

down or let 'em leave the country anymore.

But The windmills.

The windmills, yes, exactly.

They had about, 10,000 left.

And a lot of 'em were deteriorating because they didn't

really use windmills anymore.

They had modern factories.

But the city of Holland basically got an exemption that if they could

find a windmill, the Dutch government would allow them to bring it over.

And that happened in 1964.

They had sent a delegation over and they happened to find a

privately owned windmill that was in deteriorating condition.

They were able to buy it from the owner and got permission to bring

it here over to West Michigan.

That's absolutely incredible.

And I say that because it would be very easy to just say,

Hey, we got tons of pitchers.

Let's just build one of our own.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah, and that's happened subsequently.

There was one mill, another mill actually allowed to lu leaf to Aruba,

which was a Dutch colony at the time.

And, there's other Dutch American spots here in America where they've

done exactly what you described.

They've built a brand new windmill.

They're beautiful.

They're great.

They don't have quite the historic status that ours does the story

way back in the Netherlands.

But they're neat to see.

Where did the idea come about to you start planting

because this is another thing that, you not see a photo of tulip.

whenever there's a photo of Holland as well.

You got the windmill.

You've got the tulips.

So where did this expanding of creating a garden come from

and planting of the tulips?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: I think that's just natural.

If you've been to the Netherlands, they are one of the world's leaders

in horticulture and flora culture.

And the most, common flower associated with them is the tulip.

Tulip Time, it started just, a couple decades before the windmill got here.

So in town they were plant tulips all over.

But there's always this desire to have large planted tulip areas.

And there's a couple places, the NES family had a tulip farm as

well as some other places in town.

But they thought we have 36 acres around this windmill.

Why not make it into gardens?

So build some Dutch buildings and then plant some Dutch gardens.

So tulips were here.

Tulip Time had existed for a little bit before then.

But really they thought this could be a focal point for the festival.

Now, one of the things that I do want to talk to

you about is that typically tulips are not something that blooms year.

There's like a very short window of time that the tulips are in bloom.

Hence the reason why you've got the Tulip Festival in tulip time.

So talk to us about what happens during the rest of the time, when we're outside

of that window of tulips, what's the major draw to the Window Gardens?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: First I'm really proud

of you for knowing that.

Because we get a lot of phone calls and visitors who come in August or call in

July and wonder where those tulips are.

But, like you mentioned, we plant a wide variety of tulips.

So we try and extend that tulip season as long as we can.

So usually from about mid-April through, we hope mid, mid-may, end

of May, we'll have tulips in bloom.

But we also, when those are done, we actually pull them and re.

most of our gardens with all annuals.

And we have a number of perennials.

So we're actually of a two season gardens because our park is open from April,

middle of April till early October.

So we have flowers through that whole time.

We tell people if you wanna see tulips, obviously come in the spring, come

to around the Tulip Time Festival.

But otherwise you can come, anytime June through September and see a great

number of flowers, probably 80 plus different varieties of annuals and

perennials and trees and things like that.

And we've really focused on that garden area.

So we're, we'll, we're still there six months of the year.

Tulip Time Festival is about half our visitors for the year.

We usually see 50 to 60,000 people over nine days.

And we get, lately our numbers have been about 120 to 150,000

people for this season.

Yeah.

It's busy place during Tulip Time and a nice, comfortable, beautiful

place outside of Tulip Time.

When you're going in there and working in the garden and you're

talking about, pulling out all these other plants and putting these things in

here, why don't you talk to us a little bit about the management of that process.

How does that work?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: It's really cyclical for the year.

It's interesting because if you imagine yourself here for the festival, you

see all the beautiful tulips in bloom.

That's actually the time when our horticulture staff is beginning

to plan for the next Tulip Time.

We put in as a city our tulip order, in the summer.

So they're planning out, do we want to expand any areas?

Do we wanna try any new tulips?

They need to figure that out in June.

We put the tulip order in, so the tulips, be, are done blooming.

We have a tulip dig where we invite folks to come and dig a lot of

those tulips out, locals, anybody.

And then we replant with annuals.

And that's then again, in September, we still are looking pretty good.

The weather's nice, but by October we actually have to pull all those annuals

out because by then our tulips from the Netherlands that we order every year.

We need to plant those bulbs.

So we have to pull everything out, plant those bulbs, and then put

deer fencing up so our four-legged friends don't eat all of our tulips

before next season's festival.

When you put in an order for the Netherlands, how

many tulips are we talking about?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: So the city as a whole puts

in a large order altogether.

Windmill Island plants about 150, 160,000 tulips depending on the year.

The city does multiple times of that because they have lots of city

parks that are planted, tulip lanes.

So we're talking a good size tulip bill, and hundreds of thousands of

tulips, usually half a million or more.

And when we're talking about this, what you mentioned

before, these are all planted by hand?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: They're a lot of 'em are planted by hand.

We do have a modified onion planter that we use for our

large agricultural style fields.

Nice.

So we have about three or four acres that are the big fields that look like

you're in a farm, or it looks like you're in the Netherlands, where you

can get a great picture in front of the windmill with a big field of tulips.

And then we have some smaller garden bed areas with some more unique varieties.

Some more small plantings where you can put your kid down in

front of and get a great picture.

Or just some neat ones that some of them are very expensive, so we only buy

maybe a hundred or 200 of them and we can of showcase them in those areas.

What I'd like to do is take a step back cuz you were talking

about before, and I believe the term that you used was frugal with the money.

And I know that the Windmill Island Gardens is a major

draw and it looks beautiful.

How are you able to maintain this balance?

Or how did you get the gardens to where they are today

versus when they started out?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: That's a great question.

So the park itself opened in 1965 and the city had really been, I don't

wanna say talked into this, but there had been a study done by the state

that said, man, if you get a windmill and if you're able to do gardens and

Dutch buildings, you'll get a million people here a year to visit this place.

That was obviously an overshot.

We've never been near.

We hit our record number last year and we were about 150,000.

Those first several years were very busy.

People came and saw the windmill, came and saw the gardens, checked it out.

That, those numbers lasted for 20, 25 years and then our

attendance started to go down.

Cultural tourism wasn't really the hot thing back then.

There's lots of competition.

The Cedar Points and Michigan Adventures of the World.

Kids liked to do that.

So our numbers through the kind of late eighties and the end of the

nineties went down to the point where we were only getting about

40,000, 50,000 visitors a year.

The, it was actually costing the city several hundred thousand dollars just

to keep the place open for tourists.

The city at that point had a decision.

Do we just make this into a municipal park, allow it for free, not have as many

attractions, or do we somehow redo this?

Fortunately they, they gave it another shot.

And with that, the, tourism's been back in the two thousands, has

been doing a little bit better.

So we cut everything we could at that point.

Really analyzed all the spending we were doing.

all the employees we had.

Again, tourism numbers went back up.

So it was a good Crosspoint where of the things we developed, some new programs,

new events, a focus on, like you said, those gardens outside of Tulip Time.

Tulip time's a blessing.

But we knew we needed more people here in June, July, August, September.

So we've continued to see that.

And that's definitely a focus of ours.

We've managed to turn the place around.

So we we don't take any general fund money.

We're self-sustaining with about 150,000 visitors a year.

We have some great programs.

We have things like weddings that we added.

Those have been a nice revenue stream in about the last 20 years or so.

So again, just looking at things consciously of how do we develop this

place, keep it self-sustaining, keep it, a fun place for people to visit who have

either never been here or who've been here before and wanna see something different.

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Hello everyone.

Welcome back to Ordinary People, Extraordinary Things.

I'm your host, Cliff DuVernois.

Today we are talking with Matt Helmus.

He is with the Windmill Island Gardens Development Manager

for the city of Holland.

Matt, before the break, you had made a comment about sustainability.

And what I would like to do is I'd like to talk about some

of the programs that you got.

Sustainability is one of like hot button items that people are

really getting jazzed up about.

So talk to us a little bit about that sustainability.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah, so that's a great thing, we can

accomplish on Windmill Island was talking about sustainability as one of our themes.

So it's really neat that we have the windmill as the center of our operations.

And we talk to folks about, modern wind energy is really

taking off with these newer style windmills that get electricity.

But we can talk about that.

That's been going on for four or 500 plus years.

So we show in our windmill, it doesn't take power, it actually produces power.

We catch the wind and we can grind grain in there.

And we still do that to this day.

Then we have an energy park, right across the park from us as a natural gas plant

that was built just a few years ago.

That's very modern that the city built.

Very efficient.

But we can say, that's how we get power today.

This is how folks got power back in the 15, 16, 17 hundreds.

We do a lot of talk with gardening, sustainable gardening, and we're also a

absolutely beautiful natural area where we have a lot of wildlife friends out

there, a lot of birds, a lot of mammals.

So people like to come out there, go bird watching, just check out our park.

And we try and do that all in the most sustainable way we can,

gardening wise and just, tourism.

What I would like to do is talk about outside of Tulip Time

is I'd like to talk about some of the other events that you have going on

in the gardens throughout the year.

So if you would just share with us a couple of the things.

that come to mind.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah.

So every year we try and do a different theme, in our garden.

So when we pull all those tulips and plant the annuals, we try

and do it differently every year.

So you don't come and see the same flowers in the same spot every year.

So like this year, our theme is a celestial season.

So our plantings will be planted around the theme of sun, moon, and stars.

So some of the plants will have certain names that suggest that.

There's one called Drops of Jupiter, which of course I can't

remember what kind of plant that is.

But a lot of 'em are name wise.

Some of them will be artistic in the bed, might look like a

moon or something like that.

it's, so that's really neat so kids and adults can really go through

the gardens and see that theme.

With that, we'll have some associated programming.

We're hoping to do some stargazing and that sort of stuff out there.

It's great.

Yeah, we're right on the edge of downtown.

But we're far enough away that we don't have so much light pollution.

So folks can come out and stargaze.

We've also, this year, just this is last winter started a called Magic the Mill.

It's a Christmas light event that we ran for three weekends around Christmas

time and yeah, we lit up the park.

We did keep our theme, so we didn't want to go completely out of our theme area.

So the highlight of it was really about a thousand or a thousand l e d

light tulip field that had a sound.

Music basically to it.

So it lit up sound and light show.

I tell people, imagine if the Tulip Festival and the musical

fountain in Grand Haven had a baby and it would be this tulip field.

So it's, you got music, you got light, and you got tulips.

So it was a, it was a big hit.

We sold out, several of the weekends.

Again, just a way to invite people down year round, down to Windmill Island.

Now when you're talking about this light show that's

being put on, is it something that people walk around and see or is it

something that you do in your car?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yep, it's a walk around.

So our park, doesn't have so much, we have a limited parking lot.

So it's not like what they do in Grand Rapids at the White Cap Stadium.

It is a walk around.

But it's a great kind of, it's maybe about half a mile walk.

But it's beautifully lit up outside.

And we have things in our buildings.

We have food available.

Kids can visit Sinterklaas, who's the Dutch equivalent of Santa Claus.

They can hear our street organ playing, holiday favorite.

They can ride the carousel.

They can come in and get a cup of hot cocoa.

It's, it was just a absolute hit for our community and for a lot of visitors.

And that's another thing too that's seems to

be really popular in the windmill garden is that piano organ thing.

The thing is huge.

Where did that come from?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: That's a whole nother, we call

it our three Dutch treasures.

So obviously the windmill is the heart of the island.

Our, we have a carousel that we brought over in the seventies.

But the street organ is the other third of our Dutch treasures.

That actually predates the island.

And it goes back to World War II when the Netherlands was devastated by Germany.

And a lot of people in this area, being of Dutch extract sent food,

money, clothing back to the homeland.

And as a way to say thank you, in Amsterdam, the school kids raised

money, bought an organ, and the city sent it over to Holland, Michigan.

And so we've had that organ since 1947.

And it's still, we for a couple decades it wasn't functioning.

But we do work on it now every year.

So it plays fun.

Dutch songs, fun American songs, things like the beach Boys even.

It's run like a player piano, if you've seen the back there.

Yes.

we don't play it like an instrument, we play it like a player piano.

So it's a highlight for old, old folks.

For young kids.

They get to hear some favorites on there.

So it's an absolute fun piece to have at the island.

Now, typically when the garden is opened and en close.

Is this something that's really set on a set schedule?

Are you letting the weather dictate when this is open?

How does that work?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: So our season is,

mid-April through October.

And we are open seven days a week in that season.

And we will very rarely shut due to bad weather.

Because the nice thing is we have great gardens to enjoy outside.

But there's also a portion of it inside.

You can still hear the organ inside the organ shelter.

You can hear, you can go in into the windmill, you can visit our shops.

We have movies that you can see on site.

We have a conservatory.

So really we are open, rain winds shine, we are there.

Sometimes snow.

We hope.

No, we hope no snow while we're open, but happens on occasion.

With regards to putting on the festival, maintaining the gardens,

what would you say would be some of your biggest challenges that you have to face?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Weather would be one

that we just touched on.

Staffing is another.

We are very fortunate.

During the Tulip Time Festival, we staff up to about 75 people.

During the rest of the season, we have anywhere between 40 and 50 staff.

Just like everywhere these days, it's hard to find staff.

So we're, scrambling and hiring now to make sure we have enough

people to greet visitors.

Because we know if we're there, we wanna provide a good experience.

We wanna make sure that we have people there to sell you your ticket.

But as well as to greet you, to show you around the park, tell you

all about what we have to offer.

So that's always a changing crowd of folks there.

So we have a lot of younger people and then some early retirees.

So you can always find a, friendly, smiling face to show you're on the island.

One of the things that we talked about with Mayor Bocks

was the fact that all of this new manufacturing is coming into town and

people are expanding their companies.

How is that going to impact the Windmill Gardens?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: We hope it only helps us really.

One really cool thing we can do at the island is we share different

stories with all different people.

Some people think we're this old, Dutch Heritage Park only if you're interested

in Dutch stuff, would they visit.

But actually it's neat.

We say under this big Dutch umbrella, we can share a lot of stories.

We can share agriculture, horticulture, engineering, music.

Any sorts of things like that.

So one of the most amazing things to us is when we connect with some of

these business groups and you watch these engineers go up in the windmill,

that's hundreds of years old, and they see the gears and they start geeking

out about, the gear ratios and things like that and what kind of wood is

used in those and how do they design this back in the 16, 17 hundreds.

it's amazing to see.

So we've seen several local companies actually partner

with us on different projects.

We had a scout group come in and was helping us do some

metal work in the windmill.

Because it's an old way to produce food.

We still get to deal with the agriculture department.

And they say everything that food touches has to be stainless steel.

Well, that was a little hard.

Everything was wood.

So they actually helped us take apart the machinery we had and

put stainless steel on the inside.

So the inside's very modern but the outside still has that wood, exterior.

So it looks historical.

And that was a local metal company that helped us do that.

So we're very fortunate to have such a thriving manufacturing

business community in this area.

I'm loving this synergy between the garden and the man and the

manufacturing that's going on in the area.

And you hinted on this before, is that the windmill is still producing food.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: It does.

Yep.

So we are currently training, new millers as we speak.

The windmills turning, we are training some new folks to be able to grind.

That that's a, an interesting process.

It's not something you can go learn in the town next door.

So we're having some help from folks from the Netherlands and

some other mills in the US.

But yeah, we typically produce about 15,000 pounds of grain every year.

it

Sweet

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: to flour.

Yeah,

just from the one windmill.

And that's, that only takes a couple days a year of grinding.

We can grind, two to 3000 pounds of flour in a couple hours.

So it doesn't take that long.

It takes a lot to package because your typical tourist doesn't want to

take home a 50 pound sack of flour.

Like we would've, usually way back given to people.

They wanna bring home, maybe a pound or two bag of flour to be able to

make cookies or bread out of it.

So mostly sold right on site.

Oh, that's, that was gonna be my next question is do

you do baked goods with it as well?

If somebody wants to get a loaf of bread, cuz this was made in a real windmill.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: So we sell in the flour.

We have done some cool projects in the past where people have made beers and

baked goods and things like that out of, the things we produce in the windmill.

So some neat projects, some neat, yeah, good things to taste, good

things to eat and drink as well.

Now, how are you working with the actual city of Holland?

Because as we're doing this interview right now, we're actually in city hall.

So how are you working with the city to make sure that you've got this balance

of people that can still come out and see the gardens versus being in town?

Cruising the streets?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah.

So the cool thing is we are municipally owned gardens.

So we are set up what's called an entrepreneurial fund, kind

of like, uh, city golf courses, cemeteries, parking facilities are.

So we're meant to be self-sustaining, that we don't suck money

out of the general fund.

We sustain our own budget.

But we're really a benefit for the city and the city thankfully the

city council's very they appreciate what we do out there because they

know lots of people come to see us.

We are city owned.

That the city does have some control over what goes on out there.

But we also can work with great partner organizations like Tulip

Time, like our visitors bureau, like our Chamber of Commerce.

So we're a little bit more entrepreneurial in that sense as

well, that we can do some things that normal city governments don't do.

And we do some of those fun projects.

So I say, I probably have the most fun job out of any of the city employees here.

I'm not, processing forms.

I'm not in a police cruiser, things like that.

My day job is running a heritage park, which really changes day to day.

But it's really neat.

It's a way for the city to draw visitors to welcome visitors,

in a very unique setting.

One of the things that I would like to discuss is that

whenever, and we've brought this up several times, whenever we're looking

at pictures of Holland, it is typically, like right now, I got a Shoreline

magazine, and the very first photo is of the windmill, and it's above the tulip.

So literally, this is almost like the face of the city of Holland.

Talk to us a little bit about having that type of pressure that y

you've gotta maintain those gardens.

Those gardens have got to be like spot on.

So talk to us about managing that pressure on top of managing all

these people to make sure that you are living up to this mental image

that people have of the Holland area.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah, Yeah,

it's, it's a, I typically look at it as a good thing is that, again, when folks

are visiting, one of the first things they see is usually an image of the windmill.

Or they know they came to Holland and we, they heard about this

old windmill that we have.

So they ask to see us.

So we have a readymade crowd.

It helps with marketing that way.

But like you said, it's also.

we do wanna make sure we're doing a great job representing the whole

community as well, so we're not just representing the Dutch community.

And that's again, where we look at we're, it's not all Dutch people live in Holland.

There's just a chunk of us now that, that are Dutch Americans.

We have a lot of other folks here with us too.

So the city really values that.

And that's why we've looked at those different ways.

Some STEM ways.

We have a new, water exhibit area that we're developing.

Again, you can come, you don't have to give a rich a rip about Dutch

heritage to enjoy a water exhibit.

And you learn how the Dutch have dealt with it in the past, but how

we're dealing with it currently.

But we just wanna connect with everybody who visits in any way.

And for our local community, we have walking and biking trails

out there that folks will come out and just enjoy that area.

We have, free access to folks who live in Holland, Michigan.

We.

We provide free access to them, cuz the last thing we want is to be

seen as a tourist trap or something that, you only bring, you only go

there when your grandkids are here or you got friends from out of town.

We like people to go down there pretty often.

So we don't love to hear, I've never been there.

I've only been there in third grade on my field trip.

We like when Hollands come and visit, city of Holland, folks come and visit as

well as just anybody who comes and visits.

But, the Visitors Bureau tells people go visit.

Magazines tell people go visit.

So it is nice that we have a already built crowd.

We just try and do our best to make sure we're looking

our best when they get there.

Certainly, and a couple things that you've mentioned

in this interview is the fact that it seems like between, Holland,

Michigan versus Holland, Netherlands.

It seems like there's been like a lot of the times where the people

in the Netherlands have actually come over here and helped out.

Talk to us a little bit about that relationship there.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Yeah, that's, again, we value that

I think as a city and definitely at Wind Island Gardens as the park.

we realize that we have to keep a connection there.

We're trying to show off a piece of Dutch heritage and the windmill

and the organ and things like that.

So the city actually sent me over to the Netherlands about three

years ago, prior to the pandemic, and I connected with a lot of these

people who have similar jobs that.

showing off, older Dutch heritage.

But doing it in a modern context.

So we really brainstormed and said, I was trying to learn from

'em, how are you doing this?

you're a multicultural nation at this point.

So how do you tell everyone's story?

And how do you make everyone feel included?

And what stories are you telling that aren't just old history.

I love old history.

But I know I'm a, I'm a unique guy that a lot of people don't love to just read

history all day and learn about old stuff.

They want something relevant to them.

And that's what we found some great ideas.

That's where we got the idea for our water exhibit.

And they were really falling over themselves to help us because they

thought it was so neat that people are telling a bit of Dutch culture and Dutch

history here in America, the Midwest.

And they're doing the same thing over in the Netherlands.

So they've been very helpful providing materials, translations,

trainings, kind of anything we want, they've been helpful with.

And the neat thing is, even the town of the windmill came from, we bought

that windmill from a very small town.

And that windmill was the heart of the community.

And they've since rebuilt their own windmill that just opened

about the time I visited.

So it was really neat to go and connect with them.

And now we have a good relationship, working relationship.

We call it our sister mill over in the Netherlands.

So they're happy to help us do training, happy to help us do marketing as well.

Nice.

Because I can imagine from their standpoint it's, cuz those original

settlers that came over here were now four or five generations past.

So to still be able to cling that heritage has got, it's got, probably

gotta make them pretty proud.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: it.

It is.

And one of the neatest compliments we can get is, we'll get some Dutch visitors and

we'll see 'em going through the park and sometimes we'll get told, Hey, I think

that person I heard a little accent.

They might be from the Netherlands.

And we'll talk to them and say, how did, how'd you hear about us?

And then what did you think?

And the best compliment we can get is when people say, it really

felt like a little slice of home.

It looked like the Netherlands here, the way you have the garden set up

and the canals and the windmill.

And I think they appreciate, as do we, that we're not, again,

we're not trying to do it as a kitche thing, as a tourist trap.

We don't want to just, pull out our windmills, wooden shoes, tulips,

and just show 'em the stereotypes.

We want to give ' em a little bit broader picture of the Netherlands

as well as Holland, Michigan.

Matt, if somebody's listening to this interview and they

wanna connect with you or follow what it is that you're doing online, what would

be the best way for them to connect?

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: The best way to go to our

website, windmill island.com.

And again, our park is open.

We open here April 15 and we'll be open through the early part of October.

We are $12 for adults.

$6 for kids with group rates as well.

And we're there seven days a week.

Come at tulip time or come summer or fall and we'll be looking beautiful.

Excellent.

Matt, thanks so much for taking time to, chat with us today.

Matt Helmus, Windmill Gardens Holland Michigan: Thank you, Cliff.

And for our audience, you can go to total michigan.com, click

on Matt's interview and see all the links that he shared with us above.

And we will catch you next time with another great interview.