Tulip

The tulip, Tulipa, is a bulb of the lily family native to the mountains of Central Asia and the Near East, brought into cultivation by the Turks and carried to Europe from the Ottoman court in the sixteenth century; the name comes, through a misunderstanding, from the Turkish and Persian word for turban, which the flower was thought to resemble. In Ottoman Turkey the tulip was the supreme cultivated flower, so beloved that an early-eighteenth-century period of peace and refinement is remembered as the Tulip Era. In Turkish the letters spelling lale, tulip, are the same as those spelling Allah, and the flower carried a discreet sacred resonance for that reason.

The popular account of Dutch tulip mania as a national financial catastrophe has been substantially revised by modern economic historians: Anne Goldgar's archival research, published in 2007, found little evidence the crash bankrupted large numbers of ordinary people or damaged the wider Dutch economy, concluding the episode's reputation as history's paradigmatic speculative bubble was considerably inflated by later moralising writers rather than by the contemporary record itself. The garden tulip's wild ancestors are native specifically to the Tian Shan and Pamir-Alai ranges of Central Asia, in what is now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and several of these wild Tulipa species are now considered threatened in their native mountains by overcollection, even as their cultivated descendants number in the billions worldwide.

In Persian poetry the red tulip is the flower of perfect and often martyred love, said to have sprung from the blood of the lover Farhad, who died for the princess Shirin, so that a field of red tulips was a field of the blood of lovers, an image that also made the flower an emblem of the martyr. Carried west, the tulip provoked in the Dutch Republic the famous speculative bubble of the 1630s, tulip mania, when single rare bulbs changed hands for the price of houses before the market collapsed. Sacred anagram, martyr's blood and object of the first great financial mania, the tulip carries an unusually wide span of meaning for a garden flower.

The Netherlands remains, centuries later, the tulip's commercial capital in a way the Ottomans who first cultivated it never were: the country grows and exports the great majority of the world's tulip bulbs today, and the Keukenhof gardens near Lisse, opened to the public in 1950, display millions of tulips each spring and have become one of the most visited flower gardens on earth, a thoroughly modern industry and tourist attraction built on a flower with a much older and more freighted symbolic history. The flamed and feathered petal patterns most prized in Dutch tulip mania, seen in famous cultivars like Semper Augustus, are now understood to have been caused by the tulip breaking virus, an aphid-borne infection unknown to seventeenth-century growers, who prized the broken colour without knowing it marked an infected, and gradually weakening, bulb.