It’s tulip time in Addison! Every winter the town of Addison plants 55,000 tulips and daffodils in public places — along paths, in front of town buildings, along residential streets, etc. This year we had the extra hard freeze; it got down to -2 degrees! But the tulips like cold weather, so now they are blooming like crazy. This photo was taken on one of the walking paths. I do love spring. The colorful blooms are a rebirth, the promise of better days. I hope the tulips are a sign that we may finally see the end of the pandemic in the coming months. At any rate, just seeing the beauty of the tulips brings joy to my heart. Let’s learn more about them.
According to Wikipedia, tulips form a genus of spring-blooming perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes or bulbs as storage organs. The flowers are usually large, showy and brightly colored, generally red, pink, yellow or white — usually in warm colors. They often have a different colored blotch at the base of the tepals — petals and sepals, collectively — internally. Because of a degree of variability within the populations and a long history of cultivation, classification has been complex and controversial. The tulip is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae, along with 14 other genera, where it is most closely related to Amana, Erythronium and Gagea in the tribe Lilieae. There are about 75 species, and these are divided among four subgenera. The name "tulip" is thought to be derived from a Persian word for turban, which it may have been thought to resemble. Tulips originally were found in a band stretching from Southern Europe to Central Asia, but since the 17th century have become widely naturalized and cultivated. In their natural state they are adapted to steppes and mountainous areas with temperate climates. Flowering in the spring, they become dormant in the summer once the flowers and leaves die back, emerging above ground as a shoot from the underground bulb in early spring.
Breeding programs have produced thousands of hybrid and cultivars in addition to the original species, known in horticulture as botanical tulips. They are popular throughout the world, both as ornamental garden plants and as cut flowers.
History – Islamic World Cultivation of the tulip began in Persia, probably in the 10th century. Early cultivars must have emerged from hybridization in gardens from wild collected plants, which were then favored, possibly due to flower size or growth vigor. The tulip is not mentioned by any writer from antiquity, therefore it seems probable that tulips were introduced into Anatolia only with the advance of the Seljuks, an Orghuz Turkic Sunni Muslim dynasty that gradually became Persianate and contributed to the Turco-Persian tradition in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. In the Ottoman Empire, numerous types of tulips were cultivated and bred, and today, 14 species can still be found in Turkey. Tulips are mentioned by Persian poets Omar Kayam and Jalāl ad-Dīn Rûmi. Species of tulips in Turkey typically come in red, less commonly in white or yellow. The Ottoman Turks had discovered that these wild tulips were great changelings, freely hybridizing — though it takes seven years to show color — but also subject to mutations that produced spontaneous changes in form and color.
A paper by Arthur Baker reports that in 1574, Sultan Selim II ordered the Kadi of A’azāz in Syria to send him 50,000 tulip bulbs. However, John Harvey points out several problems with this source, and there is also the possibility that tulips and hyacinth — originally Indian spikenard — have been confused. Sultan Selim also imported 300,000 bulbs of Kef Lale — also known as Cafe-Lale, from the medieval name Kaffa, probably Tulipa schrenkii — from Kefe in Crimea, for his gardens in the Topkapı Sarayı in Istanbul.
It is also reported that shortly after arriving in Constantinople in 1554, Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq — ambassador of the Austrian Habsburgs to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent — claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe by sending a consignment of bulbs west. The fact that the tulip's first official trip west took it from one court to the other could have contributed to its ascendency.
Sultan Ahmet III maintained famous tulip gardens in the summer highland pastures at Spil Dağı above the town of Manisa. They seem to have consisted of wild tulips. However, from the 14 tulip species known from Turkey, only four are considered to be of local origin, so wild tulips from Iran and Central Asia may have been brought into Turkey during the Seljuk and especially Ottoman periods. Sultan Ahmet also imported domestic tulip bulbs from the Netherlands.
The gardening book “Revnak'I Bostan” or “Beauty of the Garden” by Sahibül Reis ülhaç Ibrahim Ibn ülhaç Mehmet — written in 1660 — does not mention the tulip at all, but contains advice on growing hyacinths and lilies. However, there is considerable confusion of terminology, and tulips may have been subsumed under hyacinth, a mistake several European botanists were to perpetuate. In 1515, the scholar Qasim from Herat in contrast had identified both wild and garden tulips as anemones but described the crown imperial as laleh kakli.
In a Turkic text written before 1495, the Chagatay — ethnic group of Uzbekistan — Husayn Baygarah mentions tulips or lale. Bābur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, also names tulips in the Bāburnāma, his memoirs. He may actually have introduced them from Afghanistan to the plains of India, as he did with other plants like melons and grapes.
In Moorish Andalus, a "Makedonian bulb" or "bucket-Narcissus" was cultivated as an ornamental plant in gardens. It was supposed to have come from Alexandria and may have been Tulipa sylvestris, but the identification is not wholly secure.
History – Introduction to Western Europe Although it is unknown who first brought the tulip to Northwestern Europe, the most widely accepted story is that it was Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, an ambassador for Emperor Ferdinand I to Suleyman the Magnificent. According to a letter, he saw "an abundance of flowers everywhere; narcissus, hyacinths and those in Turkish called Lale, much to our astonishment because it was almost midwinter, a season unfriendly to flowers." However, in 1559, an account by Conrad Gessner describes tulips flowering in Augsburg, Swabia in the garden of Councillor Heinrich Herwart. In Central and Northern Europe, tulip bulbs are generally removed from the ground in June and must be replanted by September for the winter. It is doubtful that Busbecq could have had the tulip bulbs harvested, shipped to Germany and replanted between March 1558 and Gessner's description the following year. Pietro Andrea Mattioli illustrated a tulip in 1565 but identified it as a narcissus.
Carolus Clusius is largely responsible for the spread of tulip bulbs in the final years of the 16th century. He planted tulips at the Vienna Imperial Botanical Gardens in 1573. He finished the first major work on tulips in 1592 and made note of the variations in color. After he was appointed the director of Leiden University's newly established Hortus Botanicus, he planted both a teaching garden and his private garden with tulips in late 1593. Thus, 1594 is considered the date of the tulip's first flowering in the Netherlands, despite reports of the cultivation of tulips in private gardens in Antwerp and Amsterdam two or three decades earlier. These tulips at Leiden would eventually lead to both the tulip mania and the tulip industry in the Netherlands. Over two raids, in 1596 and in 1598, more than one hundred bulbs were stolen from his garden.
Tulips spread rapidly across Europe and more opulent varieties such as double tulips were already known in Europe by the early 17th century. These curiosities fitted well in an age when natural oddities were cherished and especially in the Netherlands, France, Germany and England, where the spice trade with the East Indies had made many people wealthy. Nouveaux riches seeking wealthy displays embraced the exotic plant market, especially in the Low Countries where gardens had become fashionable. A craze for bulbs soon grew in France, where in the early 17th century, entire properties were exchanged as payment for a single tulip bulb. The value of the flower gave it a special aura of mystique, and numerous publications describing varieties in lavish garden manuals were published, cashing in on the value of the flower. An export business was built up in France, supplying Dutch, Flemish, German and English buyers. The trade drifted slowly from the French to the Dutch and is thought to have sparked the infamous tulip mania in Holland.
Between 1634 and 1637, the enthusiasm for the new flowers in Holland triggered a speculative frenzy now known as the tulip mania that eventually led to the collapse of the market three years later. Tulip bulbs had become so expensive that they were treated as a form of currency, or rather as futures, forcing the Dutch government to introduce trading restrictions on the bulbs. The bulb of a tulip, known as "the Viceroy," displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalog “Verzemling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders, depending on weight. A skilled craftsworker at the time earned about 300 guilders a year. Around this time, the ceramic tulipiere was devised for the display of cut flowers stem by stem. Vases and bouquets, usually including tulips, often appeared in Dutch still-life painting. To this day, tulips are associated with the Netherlands, and the cultivated forms of the tulip are often called "Dutch tulips." The Netherlands has the world's largest permanent display of tulips at the Keukenhof.
The majority of tulip cultivars are classified in the taxon Tulipa x gesneriana. They have usually several species in their direct background, but most have been derived from Tulipa suaveolens, today often regarded as a synonym with Tulipa schrenkii. Tulipa x gesneriana is in itself an early hybrid of complex origin and is probably not the same taxon as was described by Conrad Gessner in the 16th century.
History – Introduction to the United States It is believed the first tulips in the United States were grown near Spring Pond at the Fay Estate in Lynn and Salem, Massachusetts. From 1847 to 1865, Richard Sullivan Fay, Esq. — one of Lynn's wealthiest men — settled on 500 acres located partly in present-day Lynn and partly in present-day Salem. He imported many different trees and plants from all parts of the world and planted them among the meadows of the Fay estate.
Propagation The Netherlands is the world's main producer of commercial tulip plants, producing as many as 3 billion bulbs annually, the majority for export. Tulips can be propagated through bulb offsets, seeds or micropropagation. Offsets and tissue culture methods are means of asexual propagation for producing genetic clones of the parent plant, which maintains cultivar genetic integrity. Seeds are most often used to propagate species and subspecies or to create new hybrids. Many tulip species can cross-pollinate with each other, and when wild tulip populations overlap geographically with other tulip species or subspecies, they often hybridize and create mixed populations. Most commercial tulip cultivars are complex hybrids, and often sterile.
Offsets require a year or more of growth before plants are large enough to flower. Tulips grown from seeds often need five to eight years before plants are of flowering size. To prevent cross-pollination, increase the growth rate of bulbs and increase the vigor and size of offsets; the flower and stems of a field of commercial tulips are usually topped using large tractor-mounted mowing heads. The same goals can be achieved by a private gardener by clipping the stem and flower of an individual specimen. Commercial growers usually harvest the tulip bulbs in late summer and grade them into sizes; bulbs large enough to flower are sorted and sold, while smaller bulbs are sorted into sizes and replanted for sale in the future.
Because of the fact that tulip bulbs don't reliably come back every year, tulip varieties that fall out of favor with present aesthetic values have traditionally gone extinct. Unlike other flowers that do not suffer this same limitation, the tulip's historical forms do not survive alongside their modern incarnations.
Horticultural classification In horticulture, tulips are divided into fifteen groups (Divisions) mostly based on flower morphology and plant size.
· Div. 1: Single early – with cup-shaped single flowers, no larger than 3 inches across. They bloom early to mid-season. Growing 6 to 18 inches tall.
· Div. 2: Double early – with fully double flowers, bowl shaped to 3 inches across. Plants typically grow from 12–16 inches tall.
· Div. 3: Triumph – single, cup shaped flowers up to 2.5 inches wide. Plants grow 14–24 inches tall and bloom mid to late season.
· Div. 4: Darwin hybrid – single flowers are ovoid in shape and up to 2.5 inches wide. Plants grow 20–28 inches tall and bloom mid to late season. This group should not be confused with older Darwin tulips, which belong in the Single late group below.
· Div. 5: Single late – cup or goblet- shaped flowers up to 3 inches wide, some plants produce multi-flowering stems. Plants grow 18–30 inches tall and bloom late season.
· Div. 6: Lily-flowered – the flowers possess a distinct narrow “waist” with pointed and reflexed petals. Previously included with the old Darwins, only becoming a group in their own right in 1958.
· Div. 7: Fringed (Crispa) – cup or goblet- shaped blossoms edged with spiked or crystal-like fringes, sometimes called “tulips for touch” because of the temptation to “test” the fringes to see if they are real or made of glass. Perennials with a tendency to naturalize in woodland areas, growing 18–26 inches tall and blooming in late season.
· Div. 8: Viridiflora
· Div. 9: Rembrandt
· Div. 10: Parrot
· Div. 11: Double late – Large, heavy blooms. They range from 18 to 22 inches tall.
· Div. 12: Kaufmanniana – Waterlily tulip. Medium-large creamy yellow flowers marked red on the outside and yellow at the center. Stems 6 inches tall.
· Div. 13: Fosteriana (Emperor)
· Div. 14: Greigii – Scarlet flowers (6 inches across, on 6-inch stems. Foliage mottled with brown.
· Div. 15: Species or Botanical – The terms "species tulips" and "botanical tulips" refer to wild species in contrast to hybridized varieties. As a group they have been described as being less ostentatious but more reliably vigorous as they age.
· Div. 16: Multiflowering – not an official division, these tulips belong in the first 15 divisions but are often listed separately because they have multiple blooms per bulb.
Culture and politics – Iran The celebration of Persian New Year or Nowruz dating back over 3,000 years marks the advent of spring, and tulips are used as a decorative feature during the festivities. A sixth-century legend, similar to the tale of “Romeo and Juliet,” tells of tulips sprouting where the blood of the young prince Farhad spilt, after he killed himself upon hearing the deliberately false story that his true love had died.
The tulip was a topic for Persian poets from the 13th century. The poem “Gulistan” by Musharrifu’d-din Saadi, describes a visionary garden paradise with "The murmur of a cool stream / bird song, ripe fruit in plenty / bright multicoloured tulips and fragrant roses..." In recent times, tulips have featured in the poems of Simin Behbahani.
The tulip is the national symbol for martyrdom in Iran — and Shi’ite Islam generally — and has been used on postage stamps and coins. It was commonly as a symbol used in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and a red tulip adorns the flag redesigned in 1980. The sword in the center, with four crescent-shaped petals around it, create the word “Allah” as well as symbolizing the five pillars of Islam. The tomb of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is decorated with 72 stained glass tulips, representing 72 martyrs who died at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. It was also used as a symbol on billboards celebrating casualties of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.
The tulip also became a symbol of protest against the Iranian government after the presidential election in June 2009, when millions turned out on the streets to protest the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After the protests were harshly suppressed, the Iranian Green Movement adopted the tulip as a symbol of their struggle.
The word for tulip in Persian is "laleh," and this has become popular as a girl's name. The name has been used for commercial enterprises, such as the Laleh International Hotel, as well as public facilities, such as Laleh Park and Laleh Hospital. The tulip motif remains common in Iranian culture.
Culture and politics in other countries Tulips are called lale in Turkish. When written in Arabic letters, "lale" has the same letters as Allah, which is why the flower became a holy symbol. It was also associated with the House of Osman, resulting in tulips being widely used in decorative motifs on tiles, mosques, fabrics, crockery, etc. in the Ottoman Empire. The tulip was seen as a symbol of abundance and indulgence. The era during which the Ottoman Empire was wealthiest is often called the Tulip era or Lale Devri in Turkish. Tulips became popular garden plants in east and west, but, whereas the tulip in Turkish culture was a symbol of paradise on earth and had almost a divine status, in the Netherlands it represented the briefness of life.
In Christianity, tulips symbolize passion, belief and love. White tulips represent forgiveness while purple tulips represent royalty, both important aspects of Easter.
By contrast to other flowers such as the coneflower or lotus flower, tulips have historically been capable of genetically reinventing themselves to suit changes in aesthetic values. In his 1597 herbal, John Gerard says of the tulip that “nature seems to play more with this flower than with any other that I do know.” When in the Netherlands, beauty was defined by marbled swirls of vivid contrasting colors, the petals of tulips were able to become "feathered" and "flamed." However, in the 19th century, when the English desired tulips for carpet bedding and massing, the tulips were able to once again accommodate this by evolving into “paint-filled boxes with the brightest, fattest dabs of pure pigment.” This inherent mutability of the tulip even led the Ottoman Turks to believe that nature cherished this flower above all others.
“The Black Tulip” in 1850 is an historical romance by Alexandre Dumas, père. The story takes place in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where a reward is offered to the first grower who can produce a truly black tulip.
The tulip occurs on a number of the Major Arcana cards of occultist Oswald Wirth's deck of Tarot cards, specifically the Magician, Emperor, Temperance and the Fool, described in his 1927 work “Le Tarot, des Imagiers du Moyen Âge."
Tulip festivals Tulip festivals are held around the world, for example in the Netherlands and Spalding, England. There is also a popular festival in Morges, Switzerland. Every spring, there are tulip festivals in North America, including the Tulip Time Festival in Holland, Michigan; Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in Skagit Valley, Washington; Tulip Time Festival in Orange City and Pella, Iowa; and the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Tulips are also popular in Australia and several festivals are held in September and October, during the Southern Hemisphere’s spring.
Culinary uses
Tulip petals are edible flowers. The taste varies by variety and season and is roughly similar to lettuce or other salad greens. Some people are allergic to tulips.
Tulip bulbs look similar to onions but should not generally be considered food. The toxicity of bulbs is not well understood, nor is there an agreed-upon method of safely preparing them for human consumption. There have been reports of illness when eaten, depending on quantity. During the Dutch famine of 1944-45, tulip bulbs were eaten out of desperation. Dutch doctors provided recipes.
“Tulips,” a poem by Sylvia Plath “Tulips,” written on March 18th, 1961, is one of Plath’s most beloved and critically acclaimed poems. Ted Hughes has stated that the poem was written about a bouquet of tulips Plath received as she recovered from an appendectomy in the hospital. “Tulips” is a rich and evocative poem. Plath contrasts the whiteness and sterility of the hospital room with the liveliness of the tulips. In regards to the former, she explains “how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.” There, she is “nobody” amidst a sea of faceless nurses who bring "no trouble." She is frequently numbed by medications and has lost all of her "baggage." She is but a “thirty-year-old cargo boat” whose former life has disappeared. In other words, she treasures the whiteness and sterility because they allow her an existence devoid of any self, in which she is defined by no more than the feeling she has at any particular moment. She has no context. The tulips work against her desire to "lie with [her] hands turned up and be utterly empty.” She personifies them with excitability, with loud breathing and with eyes that watch her as she rests. Her choice of adjectives - "excitable," "red," vivid" - all imbue them with a sense of liveliness. In fact, they are dangerous and alluring like an African cat. Even their color reminds her of her wound, which implicitly suggests it reminds her of her past. The main tension in the poem, therefore, is between the speaker’s desire for the simplicity of death and the tulip's encouragement towards life.
“Tulips Shall Grow” - 1942 short film “Tulips Shall Grow” is a 1942 American animated short film in the Puppetoons series, directed by Geoge Pal and starring Rex Ingram and Victory Jory. It was released by Paramount Pictures and originally photographed in 3-strip Technicolor. It later became the black-and-white edition by National Telefilm Associates. A Dutch boy and girl's idyllic existence is destroyed when they are overrun by a group of Nazi-like mechanical men called "The Screwballs," who lay waste to everything they touch. The Screwballs are later destroyed by a thunderstorm — the rain of which causes them to rust — and the boy and girl's idyllic life resumes. The cartoon was nominated for the Oscar for Best Short Subject, Cartoons. In 1997, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."
“Tulips” – 1981 film
“Tulips” is a 1981 Canadian-American comedy-drama film starring Gabe Kaplan and Bernadette Peters. The director was officially credited as "Stan Ferris", but the film was actually directed by Rex Bromfield, Mark Warren and Al Waxman.
Leland Irving (Gabe Kaplan) is depressed and lonely but his attempts at suicide are unsuccessful. He hires a professional hit man, Maurice Avocado (Henry Gibson) to kill him; Avocado will use the code word "Tulips" when the time is at hand. While awaiting his fate, Leland comes across a woman — Rutanya Wallace (Bernadette Peters) — who is attempting suicide and saves her. Rutanya is suffering from being rejected by a lover, but is charmingly unconventional and outgoing, the opposite of Leland's introvert. Their lives become intertwined, and although wary and battling initially, they fall in love and marry.
However, now that they have found each other, they must call off the hit by Avocado, and complications arise. When Avocado will not agree to calling off the hit, Leland and Rutanya desperately try to obtain guns, etc., to attempt to kill the killer. In the end, no one dies.
In one of the early scenes of their courtship, Leland plays the tuba while Rutanya sings "Sidewalks of New York."
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