A flower with pride and elegance and an extraordinary history... A flower of Spring and renewal, beautiful enough to inspire poets but, strangely enough, I could not find any inspiring poem of tulips. Some say tulips “should be behind bars like dangerous animals...“! All scared, I gave up looking for sublime poetry rooted in the beauty of tulips. Too sad I am not a poet, I could only see wonder in this flower. Maybe my images would say so...
The tulips were once wild flowers growing in the Central Asia. Then they were cultivated by the Turks, apparently, as early as 1,000 AD. The tulips were introduced in the Western Europe (Netherlands) in the 17th century by Carolus Clusius, a biologist from Vienna. When he became the director of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, the oldest botanical garden of Europe, he started to research medicinal plants and while doing so, he received some bulbs from Turkey. The tulip is called after the Turkish word for turban. Carolus planted the bulbs and this was how the whole story started.
In the beginning of the 17th century the tulips were used as a garden decoration besides medicinal purposes. But soon they gained unexpected popularity in Holland where the interest for this flower was tremendous, and bulbs were sold for unbelievable prices (sometimes the prices of a house!). “Tulipomania” was an economic phenomenon - the price of tulip bulbs climbed to the equivalent of today’s thousands of dollars. People bet their homes, land and all else, hoping they would find buyers who would pay even more. Sadly, they did not even planted the tulips; the bulbs were too valuable for the ground. It all came to a crashing end, when the tulip market was saturated with bulbs, then homes, land and values were lost.
Today, tulips are grown around the world, with many varieties, hybrids and mutations. Like no other flowers, large fields of tulips can be seen in many parts of the world, and weeks-long festivals are dedicated to the famous tulips. Tulips bring countries together and make friendships. Holland sends bulbs every year to Canada, in gratitude for the second world war liberation. I hope you will enjoy my vision of tulips, in the absence of any sublime poetry dedicated to them.
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