Tulip

Scientific

Tulipa contains roughly 100 species native to the steppes and mountains of Central Asia, Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus. The wild ancestor of most cultivated tulips is uncertain — Ottoman selection and Dutch breeding produced a tangle of hybrids that doesn’t trace cleanly to a single wild progenitor.

The “broken” tulip patterns (multicolored stripes against a base color) that drove the 17th-century Dutch tulip mania are caused by a virus (tulip breaking virus) that weakens the plant and produces the distinctive striping — [[the-market|the market]] valued infected bulbs without knowing they were infected.

Cultural and historical

Tulips were cultivated extensively in Ottoman gardens — the Tulip Era (Lale Devri) of the early 18th-century Ottoman Empire is named for the flower’s central place in elite culture. Carolus Clusius’s 1593 bulb plantings at the University of Leiden Botanical Garden brought the species into northern European horticulture; within a generation, tulip-breeding had become a Dutch national obsession.

The Tulip Mania of 1636–37 — when rare bulbs reportedly traded for ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman — collapsed in February 1637 and remains the first documented speculative bubble in modern economic history.

Modern production

The Netherlands remains the global center of tulip cultivation and bulb export. Lisse and the Bollenstreek produce most of the world’s bulb supply.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[onion]] · [[lily]] · [[hyacinth]] · [[walnut]] · [[daffodil]] · [[chervil]]
• Member of: [[plants]]

Sources

• Wikipedia — Tulip
• Mike Dash, Tulipomania (1999)

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A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].