Tulip
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 Cultivated Tulip - Floriade 2005, Canberra
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Tulip (Tulipa) is a genus of about 100 species of flowering plants in the family Liliaceae. Its species are native to southern Europe, north Africa, and Asia from Anatolia and Iran in the east to northeast of China and Japan. The centre of diversity of the genus is in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountains and the steppes of Kazakhstan.
They are perennial bulbous plants growing to 10–70 centimetres (4–27 in) tall, with a small number of strap-shaped, waxy-textured, usually glaucous green leaves and large flowers with six petals. The fruit is a dry capsule containing numerous flat disc-shaped seeds.
Origin of the Name
Although tulips are associated with Holland, both the flower and its name originated in the Persian Empire. The tulip is actually not a Dutch flower as many people tend to believe. Tulip or "Laleh" as it's called in Persian, is a flower indigenous to Iran, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia. A Dutch Ambassador in Iran in the 16th century, who was also a great floral enthusiast, brought back tulips with him upon his return to the Netherlands in 1592 C.E., and from there on it became known to the whole world. This part of the world is also the home of several other species of flowers and also fruits: Jasmine and Orchids are just a couple of them. Peaches (Prunus persica in Latin), Persimon and Parsley got their very names because of their Persian origins. Tulips were brought to Europe in the 16th century; the word tulip, which earlier in English appeared in such forms as tulipa or tulipant, came to us by way of French tulipe and its obsolete form tulipan or by way of Modern Latin tulīpa, from Ottoman Turkish tülbend, "muslin, gauze." (English word turban, first recorded in English in the 16th century, can also be traced to Ottoman Turkish tülbend.) The Turkish word for gauze, with which turbans can be wrapped, seems to have been used for the flower because a fully opened tulip was thought to resemble a turban.
Cultivation
Tulips cannot be grown in the open in tropical climates, as they require a cold winter season to grow successfully. Manipulation of the tulip's growing temperature can, however, allow growers to "force" tulips to flower earlier than they normally would.
Some historical cultivars have had a striped, "feathered", "flamed", or variegated flower, as in the illustration below. While some modern varieties also display multicoloured patterns, this results from a natural change in the upper and lower layers of pigment in the tulip flower. Historical variegated varieties - such as those admired in the Dutch tulipomania gained their delicately feathered patterns from an infection with Tulip Breaking potyvirus. The mosaic virus is carried by green peach aphids, Myzus persicae, an insect common in European gardens of the seventeenth century, in which peach trees were often a prominent feature. While the virus produces fantastically beautiful flowers, it also causes the plant to sicken and die slowly. Today, it has been almost completely eradicated from growers' fields. The Black Tulip was the title of a historical romance by Alexandre Dumas, père (1850), in which the city of Haarlem has a reward outstanding for the first grower who can produce a truly black tulip. This fascination with growing a black tulip, a biologically impossible task, was historically accurate to the tulipomania in which the novel is set.
Tulips can be grown in either of two ways: through offsets or seed. Being genetic clones of the parent plant, offsets are the only way to enlarge the stock of a given tulip cultivar. By contrast, tulips do not come true from seed; the mixing of genes between parent tulips is very unpredictable. A tulip grown from seed will usually bear only a passing resemblance to the flower from which the seeds were taken. This makes for great potential in breeding new tulip flowers, and great variation in the wild. However, tulip growers must be patient: offsets often take at least a year to grow to sufficient size to flower, and a tulip grown from seed will not flower for anywhere between five and seven years after planting. "Broken" tulips (tulips affected by the mosaic virus) will occasionally revert to plain "breeder" colouring, but usually maintain their colourful, infected state when grown from offsets.
Introduction to Western Europe
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It is unclear who first brought the flower to northwest Europe. The most widely accepted story is that of Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, Ambassador from Ferdinand I to Suleyman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire in 1554. He remarks in a letter upon seeing "an abundance of flowers everywhere; Narcissus, hyacinths, and those which in Turkish Lale, much to our astonishment, because it was almost midwinter, a season unfriendly to flowers" (see Busbecq, qtd. in Blunt, 7). It is worth mentioning that the words Narcissus (Narges) and Lale (Laleh) originally come from Persian. In Persian Literature (classic and modern) special attention has been given to these two flowers, in specific likening the beloved eyes to Narges and a glass of wine to Laleh.By 1559, an account was given by Conrad Gessner of seeing tulips flowering in the garden of Councilor Herwart in Augsburg, Bavaria. Due to the very nature of the tulip's growing cycle, if the bulbs are to be removed from the ground, it generally occurs in June, and they must be replanted again by September to endure the winter, Busbecq's account of the supposed first sighting of tulips by a European is likely spurious. While possible, it is doubtful that Busbecq could successfully have had the tulip bulbs removed, shipped, and replanted between his first sighting of them in March 1558 and Gessner's description in 1559. After introduction of the Tulip to Europe, it is believed to gain much popularity and shown as a sign of abundance and indulgence in the Ottoman Empire. The era which the Empire was wealthiest is called the Tulip era, in Turkish Lale Devri.
Another oft-quoted account is that of Lopo Vaz de Sampayo, governor of the Portuguese possessions in India. Having been brought home in disgrace after usurping his position from the rightful governor, Sampayo supposedly took tulip bulbs with him from Sri Lanka. This tale too, however, does not hold up to scrutiny; tulips do not occur in Sri Lanka, and the island itself is far from the route Sampayo's ships should have taken.
Regardless of how the flower originally arrived in Europe, its popularity soared quickly. Charles de L'Ecluse (Clusius) is responsible for much of the spread of tulip bulbs in the final years of the sixteenth century. He was the author of the first major work on tulips, finally completed in 1592. Clusius had already begun to note and remark upon the diseased variations in colour that made the tulip so admired. His taste for tulips quickly spread to others. While occupying a chair in the medical faculty of the University of Leiden, Clusius planted both a teaching garden and his own private plot with tulip bulbs. In 1596 and 1598, however, Clusius suffered thefts from his garden, with over a hundred bulbs stolen in a single raid. Between 1634 and 1637, the early enthusiasm for the new flowers triggered a speculative frenzy now known as the tulip mania and tulip bulbs were then considered a form of currency. The Netherlands and tulips are still associated with one another. The term 'Dutch tulips' is often used for the cultivated forms.
Tulip Festivals are held in the Netherlands, Spalding (England) and in North America every May. Tulips are now also popular in Australia, and several festivals are held during September and October in the Southern Hemisphere's spring.
The world's largest permanent display of tulips, although open to the public only seasonally, is in Keukenhof, in the Netherlands.
Selected species
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See also
- Tulip Era in the Ottoman Empire
- Tulip mania
- Species Tulips
References and external links
- Blunt, Wilfrid. Tulipomania
- Clusius, Carolus. A Treatise on Tulips
- Dash, Mike. Tulipomania
- Pavord, Anna. The Tulip
- Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire
- Old Tulips
- Canadian National Capital Commission: The Gift of Tulips
- Greig's tulip (tulipa greigii) in its original habitat in Kazakhstan
- Lalades (Tulips of Chios: Tulipa praecox, Tulipa aegenensis, Tulipa clusiana, and Tulipa undulatifolia)
- elegant-tulip-bulbs.com: Information about 3700 tulip names
- Tulip photos
- Tulip species
Gallery
Tulipa tarda
Tulipa sylvestris from Thomé, Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885)
Variegated colours produced by selective breeding
A Tulip
- 2005-04-08.FH-616.Tulip.jpg
Tulip flower
A tulip in flower
A snow white tulip
Red Tulip
A "fringed" tulip.
A double Tulip
Red tulip
Pink tulip in the city
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White and green tulips
The head of a red tulip
Tulipa fosteriana
Yellow tulip
Red and yellow tulips
The inside of a tulip
The head of a red-orange tulip
Purple tulips
Fire tulips
Red tulip
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