Trop picks: Tulips

Tulips are indigenous to Asia.They are not originally a Dutch flower, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

The native habitat of the tulip is the region around the Tien Shan and Pamir Altai mountain ranges in Central Asia.

Here, you can find at least a hundred identifiable species of the tulip growing in the wild. Their diversity bedevilled the poor taxonomists' attempts at classification. No sooner had they "identified" one species than they would find an exception that would force them to start anew. The tribes of Central Asia brought the tulip with them to the many new lands that they conquered. From the Kazakh steppes, the Seljuk tribe brought the tulip to Persia. And from the Fergana Valley, the Mughals brought the tulip to India.

Tulip mania in Asia started as early as the thirteenth century, with Persian poets singing the praises of this flower. "O cup bearer, serve us the wine soon, before the tulips wither." (It helped that the word for tulip rhymed with the word for wineglass!) As the Ottoman empire flourished, so did the tulips, even making their way onto the emblem of the ruling house of Osman.

For the Ottomans, the ideal tulip was not the rotund, cup-shaped specimen we know today, but a long, thin flower with narrow, pointed petals. Ottoman florists would often take over the reins of creation from nature, breeding their tulips to achieve the perfect shape and colours. They gave their tulips fanciful, poetic names such as "Delicate Coquette" and "One that Burns the Heart."

Over in India, Babur, the Central Asian conqueror who founded the Mughal dynasty, battled his homesickness for the wild steppes by ordering his men to plant tulips in the craggy mountains and dusty plains of his adopted home. Babur's great grandson, the emperor Jehangir, was renowned for his love of flowers. In 1620, he commissioned his favourite artist, Ustad Mansour, to paint a tulip in one of the most exquisite flower studies ever made. 

Interestingly enough, the tulip never wormed its way into the affections of the Chinese--who had both their own Central Asian invasion in the thirteenth century and their own indigenous species of the tulip, T. Edulis. According to one botanist, instead of extolling it for its beauty, the Chinese and Japanese roasted and ate the bulb of this flower, rather like a chestnut.

Sources:

Anna Pavord in The Tulip, 1999.