LILY FAMILY 



trian ambassador to the Sultan of Turkey. After the first intro- 

 duction the plants rapidly increased and were distributed 'very 

 generally throughout Europe. A careful description as well as 

 several drawings of the plant were published by Konrad von 

 Gesner, a Swiss botanist, who saw it growing at Augsburg in 

 1559. Linnaeus in 1753 simply grouped all the garden Tulips he 

 knew under the name Tulipa Gesneriana in compUment to 

 Gesner; but this name never represented a primitive form, it 

 merely designated the Tulip as it thfen appeared in cultivation. 



The wanderer made its way into. England as early as 1599 

 and became the flower of fashion for a hundred years. Then 

 a reaction came on and the "gaudy tulip" was relegated to cot- 

 tage gardens. That sort of folly finally passed and the Tulip now 

 stands simply upon its merits, which are great. 



Holland was the producing centre for Tulips as early as 1600, 

 and the astonishing craze, known as "tulip mania," began in 

 1634 and lasted four years. This was a speculative craze, ex- 

 traordinary only in the object selected for speculation; but when 

 13,000 florins were paid for a single Tulip bulb the government 

 f'clt that it was high time to interfere, as indeed it was. 



The garden varieties of Tulips are now so many and so varied 

 that florists have been compelled to group them into classes, and 

 so classified the bulbs are offered for sale by the trade. This group- 

 ing is explained by Edward Step, F.L.S., and William Watson, 

 of Kew Gardens, as follows: "Primarily we may distinguish a 

 division into Early and Late-flowering TuUps. The Early-flower- 

 ing are divided into Singles and Doubles; but the classification of 

 the Late-flowering is not nearly so simple. First, these are 

 separated under the heads of Bizarres, Bybloemens, Roses, 

 Darwins, and Parrots; second, they are divided into Feathered 

 Bizarres, Flamed Bizarres, Feathered Bybloemens, Flamed 

 Bybloemens, Feathered Roses, Flamed Roses. But where Tulips 

 are raised from seed, there is an early stage in which the flowers 

 are neither feathered nor flamed, but are of one uniform color. 

 This first flowering takes place when the seedling plant is four 

 or five years old, and its color may be white, yellow, purple, or red; 



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