TULIPS
(Last updated 12/2/03)
April, and fields are in bloom during
my annual visit(s) to the Wooden Shoe Bulb Company near Woodburn, OR (left) -
most of the overview pix below are from the late 1999 and 2000
seasons, which turned out to be particularly good ones. A tractor
is poised to lop the flowering tops off their unsuspecting stems
as soon as visiting days are over (right)
Wild tulips can be found in parts of
Europe, and a Cretan vase estimated to be nearly 4000 years old
is decorated with the tulip's likeness. However, their origins
appear to be in western and central Asia, mainly Armenia, the
Caucasus, and Persia, from which they spread along the Black Sea
to Russia, throughout the Mediterranean, and to China.
The wild tulip's natural habitat is
mountainous; many varieties bloom, flower, then wither within
the first few weeks of spring. The tulip's bulb - plus a blanket
of snow - protects the plant from the severe cold winters, and
also from the hot, dry summers of its normal environment.
Records show that tulips were cultivated
in Turkey before 1000 AD, and veterans of the Crusades described
them on their return to Europe. Tulips were particularly popular
at the height of the Ottoman Empire in the court of Suleiman the
Magnificent (1520-1566).
The Austrian
ambassador (1555-62) to the Ottomans, Ogier Ghiselin, Count de
Busbecq (1522-1592), described a number of flowers he saw at court
to his (Holy Roman) Emperor Ferdinand I, among them the "tulipan".
The origin of the word is uncertain, but one explanation is that
it's the Latinized version of "toliban," or turban,
from the flower's resemblance to the headgear of the Persians,
who at the time were a part of the Ottoman Empire.
On his return in 1563, the ambassador brought back
many manuscripts describing the civilization, culture, and politics
of the Ottomans - and also tulip bulbs. Within a few years, tulips
were flowering in Vienna, where the Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius,
director of the Royal Medicinal Garden, first worked with them.
By 1578, tulips had appeared in England, and by 1598 in France,
but it was the bulbs planted by Clusius (and Cluyt, his assistant
from Delft) when he moved to the University of Leiden in 1593
that sparked their modern history and made the tulip synonymous
with Holland.
Tulips thrived in the hands of the
Dutch, and by the early 1600's many new hybrids had been created;
the first parrot tulip (right) was described in 1630.
The first large scale Dutch cultivation
operations began south of Haarlem in 1600, and by 1610 a lively
trade had developed as Dutch aristocrats coveted exotic mutations
as symbols of status and power. By 1623 bulbs were being sold
while still in the ground and speculation in bulb futures, called
the "wind trade," was rampant. The period starting in
1634 was the height of "tulipomania," and by 1637 some
bulbs sold for the price of a good house in Amsterdam. During
this period, people abandoned jobs, businesses, and families to
become tulip growers.
The market finally crashed in 1637
when a law was passed that decreed the end of the wind trade,
bankrupting many, including some of the country's most powerful
families. But Dutch growers regrouped, and soon developed new
flower types with large heads and two-tone "flamed"
colors - now called "Rembrandt tulips" after the era
of the Dutch masters like Brueghel who featured them in their
still life bouquets. Fortunately, by 1640 Dutch settlers in America's
New Amsterdam had established the tulip as their "national"
flower; and by 1700, Turkey, which continued to prize the tulip,
was hit by its own version of tulip mania and began to import
bulbs from Holland in significant numbers. Sultan Ahmed III was
particularly smitten, and by 1730, Lalizari, his "official
tulip grower," had imported many thousands of bulbs from
the Netherlands; by some accounts, the Sultan himself was eventually
beheaded for the crime of "having spent too much money on
the annual tulip festival"
Although thousands of hybrids were
already known by the 19th century, the period from 1870-1890 saw
the introduction of several important new tulip classes, including
the Darwins in 1889, now the most commonly cultivated of tulips.
Another significant introduction occured as late as 1943, when
the enormous red Darwin hybrids (like Apeldoorn, left) were first
released. Currently there are more than 3,500 tulip hybrids and
species commercially propagated in the Netherlands, with over
3 billion bulbs produced annually on over 23,000 acres. Of these,
2 billion bulbs are exported, with over a million going to the
US; those that remain behind are used mainly for the "forcing"
of cut flowers
Tulips are categorized as singles,
doubles (resembling peonies - right), or multiflowered; as early,
medium (Triumph, Darwin) or late flowering; by stem length; and
by petal characteristics - lily (left), parrot (center), fringed
(right). They are also classified by source: many garden cultivars
derive from hybrids of Tulipa gesneriana, while the botanicals
have their origins in T. kaufmanniana, fosteriana, and greigii.
Flower color (left) varies from red
to yellow to white, with oranges, pinks, lavenders, and countless
colors in between, even dark, deep purples that closely resemble
the holy grail of the hybridizer, the "black." Cultivars
showing some green on their petals are called viridiflora (center),
and there are many bicolored cultivars as well (right).
Interesting links: Bulbs:
Tulips | Wooden
Shoe Bulb Company
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