VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Easter morning Mass in St. Peter's Square is celebrated each year amid thousands of flowers, trees and bushes thanks to a coalition of Dutch flower producers and dozens of volunteers.
Piet van den Burg, a Netherlands-based master arranger, designed the layout for 2025 to emphasize not only Easter at the Vatican, but also the Jubilee Year and its theme of hope.
The colors of the Jubilee Year logo -- red, yellow, green and blue -- were prominent in his design, said a press release from the "Stichting Bloemenpracht" (literally, the Flower Splendor Foundation), which organizes the donation of flowers as well as the volunteer corps made up mainly of Dutch citizens living in Rome.
The featured flower for 2025 is "the playful, graceful ranunculus" or buttercup, the foundation said, adding that its "airy petals symbolize the joy of the hopeful journey" of Jubilee Year pilgrimages.
The flower array on the steps leading up to St. Peter's Basilica included 18,000 tulips, 8,000 hyacinths, 2,500 large-flowered daffodils and 39,000 small-flowered daffodils. Hundreds of delphiniums, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, cockscomb and Avalanche roses also are included.
Alexander Evers, coordinator of the volunteers, told Catholic News Service April 16 that the first semitruck carrying Easter flowers arrives from the Netherlands on Holy Thursday each year.
The truck, containing the roses and other cut flowers that will be used in the large arrangements, "drives up to the top of the Vatican gardens, where the trailer is emptied entirely," and the volunteers, working with Vatican employees, start putting the pieces together.
"Usually around 35 volunteers from the Netherlands are working extremely hard from Thursday until Saturday afternoon, to produce all the big flower arrangements and put everything in its place in St. Peter's Square on Holy Saturday," he said.
A truck carrying flats of potted tulips, daffodils and other flowering bulbs arrived in St. Peter's Square at about 7 a.m. Holy Saturday.
"It usually takes about an hour to get everything out," Evers said. "With the great help of a number of the Vatican gardens personnel, the big pieces are transported from the gardens into the square using smaller pickup trucks and tractors. It's a fairly major operation -- putting some 50,000 flowers out in the square!"
