Tulipmania Art

The name the tulip originally bore in its homeland, Persia, was “laleh”, defining it as “Flower of God”, because the letters forming the name of the flower coincided with the letters forming the name of god – Allah. When the tulip traveled to the Ottoman Empire, it preserved the roots of its name, being called “lale” in Turkish. How come then, that it got to be called “tulip”?

Well, at first, when the tulip arrived to Europe from the Ottoman Empire, nobody knew the name of this exotic novelty of unprecedented appeal and unparalleled beauty. It was addressed with different names, from red lilly, to lilionarcisus, until its first written mention as “tulipam” in 1554, in a letter of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian ambassador to the the Ottoman Empire. The story has it that once, while traveling along blooming tulip fields, the diplomat, who saw the flowers for the first time, stopped to have a closer look and admire the blooms. The workers in the field were wearing turbans, which they decorated with tulip blooms, so when the Ambassador pointed to the head of a worker asking what it was, the interpreter answered “tuliband”, meaning the headdress, and not the flower stuck between the folds of the turban. This is how a misunderstanding made out of the Turkish “lale” a “tulipam”.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

You are probably thinking that there is a misprint in the previous sentence, but tulips indeed have tepals and not petals. For an explanation we will need to have a closer look into botanics, more exactly into its part which studies the flower structure.

Let us see! Usually the flower is composed of a whorl of colourful petals, lined on the outside by a whorl of tiny green leaflike scales called sepals. The tulip, as you may notice, seems to be deprived of any sepals. However, out of the six petals one would think the tulip has, only the three inner ones are strictly speaking petals, whereas the three outer ones are sepals that have modified to imitate the form and chromatic pattern of the petals and are formally holding the place of the missing sepals.

In the spring of 1559, the Swiss botanist Conrad Gesner saw the tulip flowering for the first time, while visiting the garden of the magistrate Johannis Heinrich Herwart in Augsburg, Bavaria, and described it as “flowering with a single beautifully red flower, large, like a red lily…”.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

With over 3000 different registered varieties, tulips come in almost every imaginable colour tint and combination. By such an incredible chromatic richness, it is curious that there is one colour absolutely uncharacteristic for tulips, missing from their colour spectrum – the blue.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

As surprising as it may sound, before taking over Holland, the tulip gained popularity in France, causing a mini version of the tulip mania there, with extremely high prices paid for rare tulip bulbs already at the beginning of the 17th century. Tulips reached and even exceeded the prices of precious jewels and the blooms were, accordingly, worn by the noblewomen of the time as posies on their décolletages, as the most luxurious pieces of jewellery.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

This rare bulb was a Semper Augustus tulip and in January 1637 its price reached 10,000 guilders. As Mike Dash, the author of “Tulipomania” puts it, it was “sufficient to purchase one of the grandest homes on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam, complete with a coach house and an 80-ft (25-m) garden”.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

After having been brought to the Netherlands in 1593 by Carolus Clusius, the prefect of the Botanical Garden of the University of Leiden, tulips started spreading in the Netherlands and gaining popularity. They were extremely praised and coveted, as an exclusive rarity and a luxury item to possess, and started being sought after and traded at very high prices, which brought about a phenomenon known as Tulip mania – the first major financial bubble in the world.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

Even though we are used to perceiving tulips as bulbous plants, they can also propagate by seeds. It is a quite lengthy process though, and it takes about 6 years for the seed to develop into a bulb and grow strong enough to bloom.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

The capacity of tulips to change their colours and, after years of monochrome blooming, to suddenly bear flowers fantastically tinted by striking flames and streaks of contrasting colours, fascinated the Dutch during the tulip mania times. The tulips were called broken and the process – breaking, but not all tulips did it, so it was always considered a miracle when it happened. The mystery was solved centuries later, in 1928, when the scientist Dorothy Cayley discovered the tulip breaking virus, called the “Mosaic virus”, which was transmitted by aphids – minute bugs, feeding on plants. Once infected, the broken tulips were displaying incredible colouring, but got weakened by the virus in time. That is why almost all the tulip varieties of the tulip mania times are extinct. Unfortunately the tulip breaking virus is not extinct, and since tulip cultivation is key to the economy of the Netherlands, to protect the tulip plantations from the virus, broken tulips are illegal in this country.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.

As you already know from our yesterday’s post, the flamed and streaked bi-coloured tulips praised in the tulip mania times were affected by the “Mosaic” tulip breaking virus, spread by aphids, and are almost extinct nowadays. However, the longing for the dazzling tulips of tulip mania times, with their striking colouring of unparalleled beauty, lived on for centuries after the tulip mania was long over.
The Dutch government published a guide on how to prepare tulip bulbs correctly, instructing people to first cut them in half and remove their flower germs, which accumulate toxins. The guide contained as well various recipes of soups, porridge, fried, roasted or mashed tulip bulbs and even ways of making flour from tulip bulbs, for baking bread.

Hard times are luckily long behind, but the tulip bulb has preserved its status of food item. Modern cuisine has explored an reinvented the tulip bulb as a culinary treat, which can nowadays be found on the menu of luxury restaurants.