87 
TULIPS 
By 
W. C. Dibble, 
Secretary of the Oregon Bulb Company, 
Salem, Oregon 
When the Austrian Ambassador first looked upon 
tulips, in bloom in a Turkish garden at Constantinople 
in 1550, he was as one watching a “new planet swim 
into his ken.” And when he caused some seed to be sent 
to Vienna, he was a prime mover in an event of great 
economic and aesthetic consequence. But like discov¬ 
erers in all ages he could have seen the moment of his 
discovery only indistinctly. How could he know that 
this flower would engage the attention of Gesner, 
Clusius and other distinguished botanists and herbal¬ 
ists, and that through their combined efforts there 
would issue a flower that would capture the fancy and 
admiration of all Europe, that a literature would arise 
about it second only to the rose, and that finally an 
astute race of business men would give it, a century 
later, a local habitation and historical value. How could 
he know that one bulb would bring in Holland $5,200.00, 
that men would trade in bulbs that had no existence as 
today we deal in fictitious wheat, that men would be 
ruined, go hungry, steal, suicide over this strange 
flower from the East. And that finally it would 
stabilize itself as a business which annually sends 
$3,000,000 of bulbs to the United States alone. 
When one considers the long course that the tulip 
has travelled, the swift and brilliant subjugation of the 
countries where it has been introduced, and the com- 
