Floral designer Susanne Schrijvers is putting the finishing touches on a sculptural bouquet of several dozen freshly cut tulips in the main salon of the Dutch ambassador’s residence on Embassy Row.

She has added branches of flowering quince and Russian olive, but the dominant effect is of a rainbow of tulip hues, raspberry and lavender and flaming orange. “Love the colors,” she says.

What doesn't she like about tulips, I ask. "When you use them with other flowers, they grow and change in the arrangement," she says, adding quickly that this very movement is what she likes about them as well.

As it grows in the vase, the tulip elongates, gyrates, swoops and then climbs. Like Schrijvers, I see this wayward quality as one of its great charms. The tulip is one of nature’s free spirits, a ballerina. For a few days last week, Schrijvers with a dozen or so volunteers transformed the elegant classical stone mansion into a stage for her floral ballet.

How do you present the Netherlands’ iconic flower in such a house of big, airy, formal rooms? Boldly.

The florist and her team arranged more than 10,000 blooms that had been cut and shipped two days earlier from Holland. Ton Akkerman, the embassy’s agricultural counselor, took a van to Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport to pick them up in 27 cartons. Back at the residence’s garage, temporarily converted into a florist’s studio, he joined his diplomatic colleagues in rolling up their sleeves to assemble some of the simpler arrangements under Schrijvers’s watchful eye.

A native tree rises from the ashes

The 180 arrangements took four basic forms: stand-alone floral extravaganzas, modest table centerpieces, ribbons of blooms in shallow trays and stems presented in ceramic tulip vases — tulipieres — made popular in the 17th century, when the Dutch lost their minds over the then-exotic and expensive tulip.

Calvinist impulses took over, and the Dutch have had a much more sober and canny relationship with this flower since. For all their flamboyance, Schrijvers’s 10,000 tulips were flown to Washington for a clear-eyed diplomatic mission. The festooned residence became the venue for Dutch Tulip Days, when the ambassador over three days hosted a lunch, reception and dinner for lawmakers and other Washington politicos, as well as talks on Dutch agriculture.

This is not to detract from the gaiety of the event, which reminded everyone that the tulip, at heart, is the embodiment of the joy of spring. (Although the events were invitation-only, there was something for the neighborhood: hundreds of tulips in silver buckets displayed along the flight of steps to the entrance on S Street NW.) The Dutch have long been proud of their ability to share their love of the tulip with the rest of the world. They export more than a billion flower bulbs to the United States annually, almost half of them tulips, said Caroline Feitel, the embassy’s agricultural officer.

"It's the message that winter is gone," said Henne Schuwer, the ambassador. "We are going on to a better season."

Previous ambassadors organized similar floral displays, but they haven’t been held for several years. Schuwer, the ambassador to Washington since 2015, decided it was time to bring the celebration back. “Nobody has ever given a bouquet of flowers in anger,” he said. He used the same line at a reception the next day, to a crowd of guests, then adding that sharing flowers is the friendliest of gestures “in a world where anger seems more and more the dominant factor in people’s lives.”

Schrijvers, who is Dutch but lives in Bethesda, where she has a floral studio, said she wanted to re-create in the tray plantings a sense of the tulip fields in the Netherlands. There, tulip growers arrange bulbs by variety in a way that creates broad swaths of color. They are a magnet for photographers, and they catch the eye of passengers landing at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

In her imagined tulip fields, Schrijvers added choice varieties to the mix, including peony-flowered, fringed and parrot tulips. Some of the major arrangements are topped with swanky long-stemmed French tulips. (She also has a florist's shop in Orleans, France.)

The colors of the blooms are eclectic, some pastel, others warm to hot. Some are flamed, like those captured in Flemish still lifes. Together, they are a happy multitude. If you use enough, it seems impossible to make tulips clash with one another.

Against this abundance, however, the tulip stems in the tulipieres look especially precious. (In the 17th century, a single bulb could cost a fortune; today, antique pottery tulipieres are the things commanding fancy prices.)

In the ambassador's library, a drawing room in the rear of the house, tulip trays stand on the mantel below the painting "Dark Magdelen" by Mary Waters, an Irish artist who brings a dark but vivid edge to Dutch master-style portraits.

In the adjoining living room hangs a massive chandelier of clear glass bubbles, a work named "Chandelier Dotshow" by Gonnette Smits of the Muurbloem design studio in Utrecht. The house has other contemporary works, all providing a modern frisson in an architecturally safe neoclassical revival house. This tension between old and new is emblematic of the role of the tulip in the Dutch psyche, an object of dry commerce and quiet passion.

In the 17th century, “we were probably the richest nation in the world,” said Schuwer, “but our ethic and religion basically said that you couldn’t flaunt your riches. Look at a Rembrandt portrait — those guys are all in black.” The love of flowers compensated “for a rather austere exterior,” he said. “This is joy from the inside.”

@adrian_higgins on Twitter

More from Lifestyle:

Calling citizen scientists: Researchers want you to track nesting birds in your garden

The key to growing healthy plants: Stay off the soil

Lessons from the first ‘tiny house’ evangelist, Henry David Thoreau