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Love Those Tulips!
| Article
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14903 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
1,489 Words |
| Author
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Virginia Greiner
Virginia Greiner writes a weekly gardening column for the
Washington Times. |
Tulips were once worth their weight in gold in Holland. But today, they don't cost a fortune. The market for tulips once rivaled that for some of today's glamour stocks on Wall Street, complete with frenzied trading, wild volatility, and financial crashes.
The Queen of the Spring Garden also has an exotic history. According to one Persian myth, a young sultan who had been rejected by a beautiful maiden wandered into the desert, brokenhearted. As each tear hit the ground, it miraculously produced a tulip.
Actually, tulips were growing wild before the birth of Christ. Probably, all cultivated tulips were developed from ones that grew in Asia Minor. Then tulips were brought to Vienna from Constantinople in the late 1500s. They were transplanted to Holland when a famous gardener in the court of Emperor Maximilian II (1527-1576) in Vienna moved to Holland, taking the best of his Viennese bulbs with him.
Dutch growers noticed that later generations of the tulip bulbs produced multicolored flowers that were striped, streaked, or blotched. Scientists found that this color "break" was due to a virus, but the unpredictable colorations caused a tulip craze in the 1630s.
Nobody can identify the cause of this explosion of popularity. Did a Dutch Master turn it into a seventeenth-century media event? Did a courtesan favor the exotic-looking flowers, making them instantly popular with the social climbers of the day? Or did a nasty blight wipe out all but a few tough varieties, making the survivors as rare as diamonds?
Tulipomania
Tulips became such a rage that a new word had to be coined for the hubbub: tulipomania. Growers were paying several thousand dollars for a single bulb; investors were buying them the way they bought stock before last fall's market crash, and people who bought the wrong kind of bulbs--ones that succumbed to diseases, produced muddy-colored blooms, or simply failed to ignite the public's fancy-lost fortunes. Others made fortunes almost overnight. Eventually, the government had to step in and regulate the trade.
Tulips also created a sensation in Turkey. Indeed, the English word tulip actually comes from the Latin version of an Arabic word for "turban," which the Turks thought the flower resembled. Sultan Ahmed III's
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