Tulips

Tulips

These finely detailed, glorious color photographs examine the tulip in all its startling diversity. All are meticulously composed and lit with great clarity and readers will be dazzled by their beauty. Whether you're an avid gardener or just a lover of beautiful photographs, you can't help but be impressed. Contemplate familiar varieties as well as exotic rarities. Browsing through these pages you'll understand why tuli-mania gripped seventeenth-century Holland, eventually ruining many of its otherwise staid and sensible inhabitants!

Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused

For history buffs or gardeners who enjoy more than just digging in the dirt, Tulipomania presents a fascinating look at the tulip frenzy that took place in Holland in the mid-1600s. Beginning as gifts given among the wealthy and educated folk of Europe and Asia, the tulip rapidly became a source of incredible financial gain--similar to today's Internet start-up companies or Beanie Baby collections. Stories of craftsmen discontinuing their trade and focusing on raising tulips for public auction, where they sold for prices comparable to that of a manor house, are astonishing. Poets, moralists, businessmen--it seems everyone was involved at some level.

Lack of regulation and poor quality control were just a couple of the details that led to the abrupt crash in February 1637. Tulipomania was the original market bust--people were ruined, debts went unpaid. It was a disaster similar to the stock-market crash of 1929. A brief resurrection of the mania occurred 65 years later in Istanbul, and while it was not the financial obsession Holland experienced, it led to the creation of standards in flower shape and increased the development of new types. You don't need to be obsessed to enjoy this book--an interest in tulips, history, and the futures market ensures that this will be a remarkable read. --Jill Lightner

A New York Times Bestseller

“A delightful read.” — Wall Street Journal

This is the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted — and beautiful — commodity in Europe. Historian Mike Dash vividly narrates the story of this amazing flower and the colorful cast of characters — Turkish sultans, Yugoslav soldiers, French botanists, and Dutch tavern keepers — who were centuries apart historically and worlds apart culturally, but who all had one thing in common: tulipomania.

Tulipa: A Photographer's Botanical

How exquisite is exquisite? Photographer Christopher Baker and Willem Lemmers, one of the world's foremost tulip experts, set out to find the answers. The result is Tulipa, where, in 350 stunning full-color plates, perfection in nature meets perfection in art.

Each specimen was chosen for its importance as a superb example of the flower's form and characteristics, and each photograph, taken at the peak of the flower's beauty, becomes a stunning portrait. The "story" behind 500 tulips is told as well, from a tulip's parentage to the history of its cultivation and discovery.

Tulips: For North American Gardens

The Tulip

In an auction held in Holland in February 1637, 99 lots of tulip bulbs fetched a staggering 90,000 guilders, more than $3.5 million in today's money. Tulipomania had reached its height, and its story is told in just one of the fascinating sections of Anna Pavord's wonderful book on this most seductive of flowers.

Pavord's passion for the flower is evident from the opening pages of the book, where she tells of scrambling across the hillsides of Crete in search of an obscure, indigenous purple tulip. The story of the discovery of this tulip leads into Pavord's extraordinary history of this beautiful, enigmatic flower. As with all the best love stories, Pavord's is told from the perspective of the object of affection--in this case, the tulip--from its adoption by the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul in the 18th century to its present cultivation by the Wakefield Tulip Society.

Along the way, incredible stories of people's investments in the flower emerge, the result, as Pavord explains, of a unique feature of the tulip. Its variegated colors are produced by a small parasitic aphid, which weakens the plant but produces its gorgeous hues. The tulipomania that gripped 17th-century Europe was a form of futures trading, as people purchased tulip bulbs at increasingly inflated prices with the hope that they would flower into the most beautiful and kaleidoscopic colors imaginable. Tulip is an extraordinary book, beautifully illustrated and offering a fascinating story of our obsession with the most ephemeral of objects. Buying tulip bulbs will never be the same again. --Jerry Brotton

Tulips: The Complete Guide to Selecting and Growing (Gardener's Library (Firefly Books))

TULIPS, is full of fascinating and useful information for the avid tulip gardener, including: where tulips came from, the great variety of tulips today, the many different uses to which tulips can be put, and much more.

A Treasury of Tulips

A celebration of the tulip with anecdotes history and ephemera. will be irresistible to anyone who appreciates the beauty of flowers.

Tulips Journal (Wire-O Journals)

Effects of light intensity on dry matter production and morphogenesis of iris "Wedgewood", as compared with gladiolus and tulip (Mededelingen Landbouwhogeschool, Wageningen, Nederland, 69-20)

Magnetic Tulip Companion (The Magnet Gardener)