TULIPA 



TULIPA 



3395 



Austrian ambassador before the Sultan of Turkey. 

 Busbequius reported that he first saw the flowers in a 

 garden near Constantinople, and that he had to pay 

 dearly for them. After the introduction of seed to 

 Vienna the tulip became rapidly disseminated over 

 Europe, both by home-grown seed and by new impor- 

 tations from Turkey. In 1559 Gesner first saw the 

 flower at Augsburg, and it is mainly on his descrip- 

 tions and pictures that the species T. Gesneriana was 

 founded. One of the earliest enthusiasts was the 

 herbalist Clusius, who propagated tulips on a rather 

 large scale. A picture from him is shown in Fig. 3866. 

 He -did not introduce the tulip into Holland, but the 

 appearance of his specimens in 1591 did much to 

 stimulate the interest in the flower in that country. 

 The best of Clusius' plants were taken from him, as 

 the admirers of the tulip were unwilling to pay the 

 high prices he demanded. After this, the propa- 

 gation of the tulip proceeded rapidly in Holland and 

 the flower soon became a great favorite. The produc- 

 tion of new varieties became a craze throughout the 

 Netherlands, culminating in the celebrated "tulipoma- 

 nia" which began in 1634. The excitement continued 

 for four years, the price of bulbs often being above that 

 of the precious metals. Thirteen thousand florins were 

 paid for a single bulb of Semper Augustus; but the 

 dealings were often in the nature of pure speculation, 

 no bulbs changing hands. Governmental interference 

 was necessary in order to end the ruinous speculation. 

 After the craze subsided, the production of varieties 

 continued upon a normal basis, and has persisted 

 throughout the centuries in Holland, making that 

 country the center of the bulb-growing industry of the 

 world down to the present day. 



The introduction of the tulip into England is credited 

 to Clusius, about the year 1577. Tulips reigned supreme 

 in English gardens until the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century, when they were neglected by the rich for the 

 many new plants from America. For a time the tulip 

 was considered more or less of a poor man's flower, 

 although it has at no time been without many staunch 

 admirers among the upper classes. 



With the Turks the narrow acuminate flower-seg- 

 ments were in favor, while western taste preferred the 

 rounded forms (Fig. 3868). The Turks seem to have 

 been satisfied with a preponderance of the reds and 

 yellows, for in the first sowings of Turkish seeds the 

 larger part of the resulting blooms were of those colors. 

 It thus came about that flowers so colored were con- 

 sidered common and undesirable in the European gar- 

 dens and all effort was directed to the production of the 

 rarer white-grounded varieties with finely and distinctly 

 marked stripes, those with a sharp bright red being the 

 favorites. Indisputable evidence of this is seen in the 

 old Holland "still-life" paintings of that time, where one 

 finds none but the rarer forms represented (Solms-Lau- 

 bach). All the early tulips of direct Turkish origin had 

 acute more or less narrow and reflexed segments. In- 

 deed, among all the old engravings, including those of 

 Pena and Lobel (1570), Clusius (1576), Dodoens (1578), 

 and Besler (1613), no round-petaled forms are found. 

 Besler's work, "Hortus Eystettensis," contains mag- 

 nificent copper plates, the first in any book on plants. 

 In some copies the plates are beautifully colored by 

 hand. The fifty-three figures of tulips in this great work 

 show how widely diversified was this flower even at 

 that early date. In this and in Parkinson's "Para- 

 disus Terrestris" (1629), many are figured with inner 

 segments rounded and outer acute, but none vice versa 

 (so far as can be seen), although that form is mentioned 

 in the descriptions. The broad, rounded, erect-petaled 

 forms were developed later, apparently first by the 

 Dutch growers before the tulipomania and contem- 

 poraneously with it, and produced wholly by selection. 

 This ideal has prevailed down to the present time, for 

 the narrow-petaled varieties are practically unknown 



215 



among our common garden forms, so much so that the 

 extreme typical one has been referred to a separate 

 species (T. acuminata, Fig. 3872). In the Dutch fields 

 they are now known as "thieves," and are destroyed 

 as soon as they make their appearance. The quest for 

 unusual colors appears to have been one feature of 

 the tulip furore. Dumas' "Black Tulip" is interest- 

 ing in this connection. 



Parrot tulips were known toward the end of the 

 seventeenth century. They were often considered 



3866. A sixteenth-century tulip. 



From the work of Clusius published in 1576. One of the 

 oldest pictures of tulips. Same size as original plate. 



to be monstrosities and were pictured as such. Accord- 

 ing to Solms-Laubach, no traces of them are to be found 

 in the old Dutch books. They were evidently developed 

 by the French, who did not disdain the yellow and red 

 forms, to which these belong, to such an extent as did 

 the Hollanders. At one tune they were made a separate 

 species, T. turcica, and were later said by one author 

 to be hybrids, between T. acuminata and T. sylvestris 

 (E. S. Rand, Jr., 1873), by another between T. Ges- 

 neriana and T. suaveolens (Mrs. Loudon, 1841). That 

 the Parrot tulips are hybrids is perhaps true, but to 

 state with certainty the parents seems impossible, for 

 as early as 1613, among the figures in Hortus Eystet- 

 tensis, there is one which shows laciniation of the 

 petals to a marked degree, sufficiently so, in fact, to be 



