`The Tulip' by Anna Pavord is a much different sort of book than the now famous `The Orchid Thief' written by `New Yorker' writer Susan Orlean and the basis of the movie starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper.
Ms. Pavord is a much more conventional writer on things horticultural, although this is certainly not a conventional horticultural book. The subtitle, `The Story of A Flower That Has Made Men Mad' begins to give a sense of the historical importance of the tulip which began as a wild flower native ranging from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to Persia (modern Iran) and domesticated under the Ottoman sultans who ruled this part of the world in the mid-15th century.
The tulip mania reached heights which are hard to believe today and I'm hard pressed to think of anything comparable in the modern world unless it is the income of professional sportsmen such as Tiger Woods and Andre Agassi who receive astronomical compensations for lending their names to commercial products purely on the basis of a skill at something which for almost everyone else on the planet is a recreation.
I make this comparison because as a tulip grower myself, I find this simply nothing more than a decoration, no more nor less valuable than our dahlias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. This book makes clear the fact that from 1560 to 1750, the tulip became much, much more than a pretty decoration for spring gardens and dining room floral arrangements.
One thing I can appreciate is the novelty of this lovely flower to the rather dour shores of France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia in the 16th century. Not only was this flower colorful, even before modern breeders got a hold of it and created an almost endless series of hybrids, but it had an almost magical property of having unusually colored mutants arise from bulbs of monochrome flowers. Ordinary tulip bulbs became unusually pricy in this 200 year period; however, these `sport' bulbs which did not carry over to seeds given off by these plants were sold for astronomical prices, sometimes even as high as the price of a house of the time (in the late 19th century, the cause of this mutation was discovered to be caused by a virus).
While the author does not offer a lot of theorizing on the subject, it seems that Europe was as interested in decorative plants acquired in this age of Exploration as they were with the new foodstuffs coming from the new world. And, while the Dutch were adept horticulturists, so that they had the skills to grow the tulip as well or better than the French or the English, they were also the leading mercantile power in Europe and Asia (leaving the New World to the Spanish) in this period. This means they had the means to bring back to Holland a wide variety of tulips and other bulb flowers.
After the tulip's financial bubble burst, it's popularity was sustained by countless garden clubs in northern Europe, especially in England, leading to the explosion we see today in tulip hybridization surpassed, I suspect by only the business in rose hybrids.
As histories of science and technology go, this may not be quite as thrilling as the history of quantum physics or astrophysics or even mathematics, but it is a great tale of where the intersection of novelty and human folly can take us.
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The Tulip Specifications
In an auction held in Holland in February 1637, 99 lots of tulip bulbs fetched a staggering 90,000 guilders, more than .5 million in today's money. Tulipomania had reached its height, and its story is told in just one of the fascinating sections of Anna Pavord's wonderful book on this most seductive of flowers.
Pavord's passion for the flower is evident from the opening pages of the book, where she tells of scrambling across the hillsides of Crete in search of an obscure, indigenous purple tulip. The story of the discovery of this tulip leads into Pavord's extraordinary history of this beautiful, enigmatic flower. As with all the best love stories, Pavord's is told from the perspective of the object of affection--in this case, the tulip--from its adoption by the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul in the 18th century to its present cultivation by the Wakefield Tulip Society.
Along the way, incredible stories of people's investments in the flower emerge, the result, as Pavord explains, of a unique feature of the tulip. Its variegated colors are produced by a small parasitic aphid, which weakens the plant but produces its gorgeous hues. The tulipomania that gripped 17th-century Europe was a form of futures trading, as people purchased tulip bulbs at increasingly inflated prices with the hope that they would flower into the most beautiful and kaleidoscopic colors imaginable. Tulip is an extraordinary book, beautifully illustrated and offering a fascinating story of our obsession with the most ephemeral of objects. Buying tulip bulbs will never be the same again. --Jerry Brotton
The Tulip Overviews
The Tulip is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has made men mad. Greed, desire, anguish, devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian steppes to the world-wide phenomenon it is today. The U.S. alone imports three billion tulip bulbs each year, Germany and France even more.
Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? The author, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, has spent six years looking for answers. No other flower has ever carried so much cultural baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behavior, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution.
The tulip made great fortunes for people but was responsible for equally spectacular bankruptcies. Millions of aficionados now gaze in awe at the brilliant flower pieces painted in the early seventeenth century by masters such as Ambrosius Bosschaert. But at the time they were painted, these works or art were considered as cheap substitutes for the real flowers. Even Jan van Huysum, the grand master of Dutch flower painting, could rarely command more than 5,000 guilders for a painting. But at auction in Alkmaar, Holland in 1637, a single bulb of the red-and-white tulip "Admiral Liefkens' changed hands for 4,400 guilders.
Roaming through Asia, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the author tells how the tulip arrived from Turkey and took the whole of Western Europe by storm. In the petals of the exquisite English florists' tulips, still exhibited in competition by members of the Wakefield Tulip Society in Yorkshire, runs the blood of flowers first grown by John Evelyn in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, the book also features descriptions of eighty wild-species tulips and several hundred garden varieties. This beautifully produced and irresistible volume will become a bible, a unique source book, a universal gift book and a joy to all who possess it.
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