The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad

By Anna Pavord

THE TULIP is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has made men mad. Greed, desire, anguish and devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip into the world-wide phenomenon it is today.

No other flower has ever carried so much cultural baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution.

Pavord tells how the tulip arrived from Turkey and took the whole of Western Europe by storm. Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781408859032

Anna Pavord

Anna Pavord is the gardening correspondent for THE INDEPENDENT and the author of widely praised gardening books including PLANT PARTNERS and THE BORDER BOOK. She wrote for the OBSERVER for twenty years, has contributed to COUNTRY LIFE, ELLE DECORATION and COUNTRY LIVING, and is an associate editor of GARDENS ILLUSTRATED. For the last thirty years she has lived in Dorset, England where she is currently making a new garden. Constantly experimenting with new combinations of flowers and foliage, she finds it a tremendous source of inspiration.

Book preview

Chapter I

A Flower of the East

Buried deep in the make-up of the flamboyant, cultivated tulips that fill flower shops in spring, must be the ghostly genes of their wild cousins. Garden tulips did not leap, fully formed onto the horticultural scene. They can only have been bred from, or selected from the species scattered through Central Asia and the Caucasus. And a malleable species, such as T. schrenkii, is likely to have been a more useful building block than a species, such as T. butkovii, which shows relatively little variation in the wild. T. schrenkii grows in the steppes and semi-desert areas of the Crimea, the Lower Don, in the Caucasus and Kurdistan. Its narrow buds open into cup-shaped flowers that may be claret-red, or perhaps yellow, pink, or white. Sometimes different colours merge imperceptibly in the same flower, the red drifting into pink so subtly that no ordinary eye could ever distinguish where the one colour began and the other ended. The fusion between the two is cloaked and softened by the glaucous bloom that covers the backs of so many of the wild species tulips. Or is it perhaps the spectre of T. praecox that haunts the flowers produced now in tens of millions by the tulip growers of the Netherlands? T. praecox is an altogether bigger, beefier thing than the elegant T. schrenkii. It has thick, stout stems topped by orangey-red flowers. The inner petals are shorter and narrower than the pointed outer ones, and they are flamed with yellow up the midribs. It was first described (in 1811) by the Italian botanist Michele Tenore from flowers that he had found growing around Bologna in northern Italy. It is known in other places in southern Europe too: Provence, the Languedoc, the Rhône valley. But was it always here? Or was it, as seems more likely, since none of the early, busy botanisers of Europe wrote about it, brought here by travellers and traders from places further east? Turkey perhaps, or even Iraq. In Turkey this particular tulip was well known enough to have acquired the common name kaba lale. Or is T. praecox perhaps not a true species at all, but the result of some early tulip lover’s interest in improving the strains of wild flowers that he found growing about him? In genetic terms, the majority of wild tulips are diploids, with twentyfour chromosomes marching in harmony. But scientific investigation in the 1920s demonstrated that T. praecox is a triploid, with thirty-six chromosomes. Polyploidy of this kind is often a clue that, in nature’s time scale at least, the plant is a relatively recent arrival. The one form arises out of the other.

The questions cannot be answered because the tulip, more than any other flowering bulb, continually slips out from under the careful parameters laid down by botanists and taxonomists. The taxonomist’s job is to pin labels on plants, each bearing a description that will enable anyone, from China to Czechoslovakia, to recognise how and why it is different from other members of its family. Often, taxonomists work from dried specimens, pressed and preserved on the dark, dusty shelves of a herbarium. But anyone who has seen tulips growing in the wild, notes the extraordinary diversity of flowers, even in a single colony of what must be a single species. Flowers of the Central Asian species T. borszczowii, for instance, growing along the banks of the Syr-Dar’ya river near Tashkent may be yellow, orange or vermilion. T. armena, widely spread in Turkey and northwest Iran, would be described by a taxonomist as a medium-sized, bright red tulip with a rather small black blotch at the base of its petals. But a group growing on the side of the road between Aşkale and Tercan, in eastern Turkey, includes flowers that are striped with yellow on the red ground. Some that are all red have no basal blotches at all. What is a taxonomist to do with such an unruly genus? The splitters among them elevated variants to the rank of yet more species. A strong-growing yellow form of T. armena found in the Transcaucasus and the mountains of Armenia was christened T. mucronata. A pale yellow form, tinged with olive on the backs of its petals became T. galatica. Another yellow-flowered type growing around Amasya in northern Anatolia, with a bluish, rather than a blackish blotch at its base, was dubbed T. lutea by the Bohemian botanist and engineer Josef Freyn (1845–1903).

Poor Freyn! In the long-drawn-out game of leap-frog between tulip and taxonomist, the tulip was always going to win. Its extraordinary diversity, its desire always to be trying on new clothes, is precisely what made it a source of wonder and delight to the gardeners who over hundreds of years gradually nursed it into shapes and shades that even the tulips themselves had not thought of. The family is still in a state of flux, but about 120 different species are thought to be spread over the Old World, three-quarters of them concentrated in Central Asia. In the New World, they did not exist until man took them there. From their hotbed, bounded by the Tien Shan and the Pamir-Alai mountain ranges, tulips spread northwards through mountains and steppes to the regions of Pribalkhash and Altai, halted eventually by the extreme cold of the Arctic. To the south, they moved in the direction of the Himalayas and Kashmir. Most extensive was their migration westwards, where they were no doubt helped on by merchants on the well-travelled trade routes which led from Central Asia into Europe. Tulips spread towards Syr-Dar’ya, the steppes of Karakum, the Hindu Kush and Turkmenistan, to Iranian Khorasan and then through northwest Iran to the Caucasus. From the Caucasus, migration continued westwards into the Balkans and from there to Italy, France, Spain and the Atlas Mountains of northwest Africa.

As the tulip march had been halted to the north by cold, here it was stopped by the inhospitable heat of the desert. Desert met them too in Israel, where tulips had moved south from the Caucasus through Syria, Iraq and the Lebanon. Nineteenth-century travellers in Kashgaria and Dzungaria, the areas east of the heartland, reported seeing the same species here as in the Tien Shan. Some species also have been found in the Kiangsi, Hupeh and Shantung provinces of China. About fourteen different species grow in the mountains of Turkey, though only four of these, T. armena, T. biflora, T. humilis and T. julia are thought to be indigenous. When it had subjugated the Turks, the tulip jumped the Bosphorus and continued its slow journey to the west, travelling with traders, explorers, even in the diplomatic baggage of envoys such as Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, to reach gardens in Italy, Austria, Germany and Flanders by the middle of the sixteenth century.

Before that, it seems to have been unknown outside its natural habitat. No tulips appear in the flower-strewn borders of the medieval manuscripts of Europe. When Hugo van der Goes (c1440–1482) painted his Portinari altar-piece, dark aquilegias, bright red lilies, blue and white iris and a scatter of violas were prominently displayed in the foreground, but there were no tulips. The botanist Conrad Gesner, describing in 1559 a red tulip growing in Councillor Herwart’s Augsburg garden, made clear that this was a grand event – as far as he was concerned, a first. But as far back as the thirteenth century, the tulip was being celebrated by Persian poets such as Musharrifu’d-din Sa’adi. In Gulistan he described his visionary garden where ‘The murmur of a cool stream / bird song, ripe fruit in plenty / bright multi-coloured tulips and fragrant roses…’ created a paradise on earth for its fortunate owner. ‘O cup bearer, serve us the wine soon, before the tulips wither,’ wrote another poet. ‘The flames in our fireplaces are the tulip gardens of winter.’ Tulips are commemorated in Turkish place names such as Laleli (place of the tulips) near Erzerum, and Laleli gecidi (tulip pass) between Kayseri and Sivas. There were grimmer references too. On St Vitus’ Day, 15 June 1389, the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Murad I fought the Serbian ruler Prince Lazar and his Bosnian allies at Kossovo Field, a high plateau sixty miles north of Skopje. A Turkish chronicler compared the battlefield, strewn with heads and turbans to a huge bed of tulips, the vivid yellow and red head-dresses mirroring the equally vivid and varied colours of the flowers.

The tulip flourished spectacularly in the later Ottoman Empire, appearing as a motif on tiles, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, miniatures, headstones, prayer rugs and murals. But it does not appear at all on artefacts of the earlier Byzantine era. This is more likely to be because they did not value the tulip than because they were unfamiliar with it, though the anonymous writer of the Defter-i Lalezar-i Istanbul, the ‘Book of Tulip Gardens in Istanbul’, does say that before the Seljuk invasion of Baghdad in 1055 only one kind of tulip, the Sahra-i Lale, or meadow tulip, was known in Istanbul. They were certainly known to the Seljuks who from the eleventh century onwards migrated west from their tribal lands in Central and Northeast Asia through Iran, Mesopotamia, and Syria. In 1096, they captured Konya in Inner Anatolia and tiles decorated with tulips, made by Anatolian Seljuks, have been excavated from the Palace of Alaeddin Keykubad I on the shores of Lake Beyşehir.

In the relatively settled period following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, tulips flourished in the gardens laid out by Sultan Mehmed II (1451–1481), who remade great tracts of the city. He built himself a palace, the Topkapi Saray, on one of Constantinople’s seven hills, and laid out pleasure gardens inside the city’s courtyards. Surplus flowers from the Sultan’s twelve gardens were regularly sold in the flower markets and eventually a staff of 920 gardeners was needed to maintain his orchards, kitchen gardens and vast pleasure grounds. In his Treatise on Husbandry¹, Qasim ibn Yuruf Abu Nasri Haravi gave precise instructions for laying out such gardens. Water channels and pavilions, he wrote, should be enclosed within lines of poplars. For each bed in the pleasure garden, Qasim suggested different flowers: colchicums with violets, roses with narcissus and saffron crocus, Persian lilac with tulips and mauve stocks. The beds nearest the house were often filled with roses, sacred in Islam as the flower which sprang from Mohammed’s sweat.

In this culture, only particular flowers were valued: hyacinths, roses, jonquils, irises, carnations, and of course, tulips. Derived from the Persian, the Turkish word for tulip – lale – was written with the same Arabic letters as were used for the name of Allah, so the flower was often used as a religious symbol. Carved as a decorative device on buildings or fountains, it was the immediately recognisable emblem of the ruling House of Osman. Early manuscripts make it clear though that the different types of tulips in gardens ‘occurred’ rather than being specifically bred, as happened under later Ottoman emperors. As Victorian fern fans enthusiastically collected from the wild strangely aberrant forms of hart’s-tongues and lady ferns with crinkled edges and tasselled ends, so curiosities in the enormous family of tulips must have been collected from the wild and brought into cultivation in Ottoman gardens. The historian Hodja Hasan Efendi, who accompanied Sultan Murad IV on his Eastern expedition, brought seven kinds of tulip back from Persia to raise in his garden in Istanbul.

Under Süleyman the Magnificent (c1495–1566), the Ottoman Empire reached its apogee, the zenith of its political and military power. It stretched from the Crimea to Egypt and covered a large part of the Balkans. Ottoman dynasties ruled in Bukhara and Samarkand and the warrior-gardener Mohammed Babur took control of Afghanistan and India. Wherever Babur went on his restless pilgrimage through Asia, he made gardens linked by a common Islamic tradition, derived ultimately from Persia. This tradition determined the kinds of plants he put in his gardens and Babur’s own journal² lists the trees and flowers he particularly favoured. He liked fruit trees of all kinds, poplar, willow, jasmine, narcissus, violets and tulips. Before he died in 1530, he visited the tulip fields around Samarkand, having already planted tulips in all the gardens he had made in Turkey and India. Miniatures painted in the Beyan-i Menazil-i Sefer-i Irakeyn by Matrakci Nasuh³ illustrate the places that his victorious armies passed through on their campaigns. One reveals tulips, growing in the wild near Konya. Another shows the tulip growing as a cultivated flower in a convent garden at Seyitgazi near

Reviews for The Tulip

[dylkit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really interesting read. And so nice to think about tulips and Spring when the weather is so dreich.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read some parts of this book but it was a bit heavy going, so I am afraid that I will be passing it on unfinished.

[frobozz-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A history of the domestication of the tulip and its spread into western Europe, with the subsequent explosion in popularity as it entered new regions. This book contains quite a bit of interesting information about the growth and fashion of tulips when they were first introduced as garden plants, as well as history of the layout and fashion of gardens in general, however it is slow-moving and somewhat repetitive. Part of this I believe is due to trying to expand the subject matter to fill more pages than it needs to be covered adequately, part due to the choice of dividing chapters by country or region and chronicling the flower's rise to - and fall from - the height of fashion in each one; the similarity in each region leads to a lot of "didn't I just read this?"

[mms_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great history of the flower.

[jwl_11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked this book up at the Smithsonian because The Botany of Desire is one of my favorite books and includes a section on tulips which I found to be especially interesting. Pavord's account of the tulip is very interesting although it, for me at least, moves a bit slowly. I've found myself having difficulty finishing it, but I don't think that is a reflection on the subject.