This species, in appearance, is very distinct from 
the splendid Tulipa Gesneriana, or florist’s garden 
Tulip. Its pointed petals, and yellow anthers, 
strongly mark its difference. Its nodding flower, 
too, as though it bowed to superior merit, is a char- 
acter peculiarly its own: quite unlike those favoured 
nurselings of the florist in their separate drill ground, 
which stand in the pride of conscious beauty, ranked 
and upright as a military squadron. 
We are fully sensible that if measured by the 
florist’s rules of beauty, our present unchangeable 
Tulip will stand excluded their society; but none 
would estimate an Italian beauty and a Dutch Bur- 
gomaster, by the same standard of value. Those 
who are uninfluenced by the conventional rules of the 
florist will admire the Tulipa sylvestris for its own 
sake ; and those of the initiated, whose taste is refined 
by such laws, should cultivate it as a foil to their 
favourites, and gather pleasure from the compari- 
son — from the advantages afforded them, by assid- 
uous and experienced cultivation. It is true wis- 
dom to search out happiness from every occurrence. 
As beauty is seen in the garden, arising out of ten 
thousand combinations of the most opposite shapes 
and colours; so, to a mind rightly directed, is con- 
tentment deducible from innumerable chances and 
circumstances to which human life is exposed; but, 
be it remembered, that as the one is available only 
through the light of the sun, so is the other through 
that of revelation. 
The Tulipa sylvestris requires no peculiar care in 
cultivation, not even the removal of its bulbs. Off- 
sets may be transplanted in August. 
Hort. Kew. 1, v. 2, 249. 
