Amélie Nothomb (b.1967 Etterbeek, Brussels) is one the most popular and internationally acclaimed French-language authors. She is prolific, publishing on average a book a year, many of which have been translated into English. She divides critics and opinion, but undoubtedly has a huge following in many countries.

Jacqueline Poncelet (b Liège, 1947) is an internationally famous artist who studied ceramics at Wolverhampton College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Anyone who has driven past Edgware Station or waited for a Circle Line Tube train there will have seen her huge, colourful 'Wrapper' (2012), part of Art on the Underground. "The work, created in vitreous enamel, dresses the building in a grid of patterns...each pattern relates to a different part of the local area...like an enormous patchwork."

Diane von Furstenberg (b. 1946, Brussels), the Belgian dress designer and highly successful business woman with an aristocratic German surname, made her name with the launch in 1974 of her smart, versatile, flattering but comfortable knitted jersey wrap dress. She appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1976, by which time she had apparently sold more than five million wrap dresses.

Audrey Hepburn (1929-93) is known the world over as an outstanding English film actress. She was, however, born into an aristocratic family in Ixelles in Brussels. Her complicated peripatetic childhood and teenage years in Belgium, Holland, and England may account for her unique accent which worked to her advantage when she played a 'European' princess in the wonderful Roman Holiday (1953).

To coincide with a visit to Belgium, this week on the Post we have five internationally famous Belgian women. According to her obituary, the film director Chantal Akerman (b. Brussels, 1950-2015) "attained a somewhat legendary status among cinephiles as a cinematic radical, a formal innovator and a pioneer of modern feminist cinema". She is best known for her cult classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (1975) which La Libération in France described as “one of those experiences that change your way of thinking, of seeing, of imagining cinema”. The BFI has a list of her 'ten essential films'.

The Hepworth Wakefield has recently created the most amazing garden (open to the public at all times). It was designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, and it's fitting that tulips are the focal point in spring, as Wakefield has played an important role in the history of tulip-growing. The Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society dates back to 1836; a tulip show has been held every year since. The society is the last remaining of its kind in Britain, and specialises in showing rare and precious tulip varieties descended from those cultivated in the mid-C17th, known as English Florists' Tulips.

Breeders in Holland have worked hard to create reliable versions of broken, striped and flamed tulips which led to Tulip Mania in the seventeenth century. They are now virus-free and easy to grow, and they continue to develop in the vase to provide a spectacular show resembling the stunning Dutch flower paintings by the likes of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). Rembrandt tulips are the closest to the originals, but other tulip groups include bi-colour flowers. Names to look for, some of which are in the photo above, include 'Banja Luka', 'Helmar', 'Happy Generation', 'Flaming Flag', 'Carnival de Nice' and 'Grand Perfection'.