The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad

This is an excellent book, giving some interesting examples of early botanical prints from the early floras, and very interesting historical information. For a person truly interested in plants, history and art, this is a wonderful addition to the bookshelf. To readers who found the book boring, I can only imagine what dull people they must be. Glossy photographs indeed! These can be found on tulips and indeed most other flowers in typical gardening catalogs, 'two-a-penny' if that is what you want. This book has a higher lineage than that.

`The Tulip' by Anna Pavord is a much different sort of book than the now famous `The Orchid Thief' written by `New Yorker' writer Susan Orlean and the basis of the movie starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper. Ms. Pavord is a much more conventional writer on things horticultural, although this is certainly not a conventional horticultural book. The subtitle, `The Story of A Flower That Has Made Men Mad' begins to give a sense of the historical importance of the tulip which began as a wild flower native ranging from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to Persia (modern Iran) and domesticated under the Ottoman sultans who ruled this part of the world in the mid-15th century. The tulip mania reached heights which are hard to believe today and I'm hard pressed to think of anything comparable in the modern world unless it is the income of professional sportsmen such as Tiger Woods and Andre Agassi who receive astronomical compensations for lending their names to commercial products purely on the basis of a skill at something which for almost everyone else on the planet is a recreation. I make this comparison because as a tulip grower myself, I find this simply nothing more than a decoration, no more nor less valuable than our dahlias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. This book makes clear the fact that from 1560 to 1750, the tulip became much, much more than a pretty decoration for spring gardens and dining room floral arrangements. One thing I can appreciate is the novelty of this lovely flower to the rather dour shores of France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia in the 16th century. Not only was this flower colorful, even before modern breeders got a hold of it and created an almost endless series of hybrids, but it had an almost magical property of having unusually colored mutants arise from bulbs of monochrome flowers. Ordinary tulip bulbs became unusually pricy in this 200 year period; however, these `sport' bulbs which did not carry over to seeds given off by these plants were sold for astronomical prices, sometimes even as high as the price of a house of the time (in the late 19th century, the cause of this mutation was discovered to be caused by a virus). While the author does not offer a lot of theorizing on the subject, it seems that Europe was as interested in decorative plants acquired in this age of Exploration as they were with the new foodstuffs coming from the new world. And, while the Dutch were adept horticulturists, so that they had the skills to grow the tulip as well or better than the French or the English, they were also the leading mercantile power in Europe and Asia (leaving the New World to the Spanish) in this period. This means they had the means to bring back to Holland a wide variety of tulips and other bulb flowers. After the tulip's financial bubble burst, it's popularity was sustained by countless garden clubs in northern Europe, especially in England, leading to the explosion we see today

This book, generally touted as 'the definitive book' on tulips, is somewhat disappointing. More interesting historical information exists on tulipomania and tulip fever. Particularly irksome is the prevalence of passages in French with no English translations. Come on, Ms Pavord, we aren't all academics schooled in French! I thought information on the discovery of the virus that causes tulips to 'break' should have been included: so much has been written already about tulip fever through the 16th and 17th centuries that to continue the history to the 1920s, when the cause of breaking tulips was discovered, would have rounded out the picture nicely. But we only receive a vague reference here and there. Considering also that the latter part of the book concerns species and hybrid tulips, more photographs would have been helpful. One description sounds much like another after a while.

Tulips, I admit, are my favorite flower. I only wished they bloomed for a longer period of time! But now that I have The Tulip I think I will be able to get through the summer, fall, and winter more easily.I really enjoyed this book in every way. The plates and illustrations are beautifully reproduced, and I did not find that they were insufficiently linked to the text. In fact, I found that after reading the text I could look at the illustrations for a long time, seeing more and more detail that I know would have passed me by without the text.The emphasis in this book is on the history of the tulip, something that I find really fascinating. From its beginnings in the Ottoman empire through its introduction to western gardens, the bacteria that led to the famous "breaks" in tulip coloration and then tulip mania, this book is a delightful, entertaining and very informative read.

This is a beautiful book and more of a history book than a garden book. I found it in the history section of a local bookstore. "The Tulip" is filled with color reproductions of paintings and prints executed in the Netherlands in the 16th-18th centuries, so one could argue it is an art book. Although the author tells the story of the introduction of the tulip into the west, the real contribution of the book as far as I am concerned is the author's discourse on the origins of the various kinds of tulips.Reading, "The Tulip" has relieved me of the feelings of intimidation I have experienced as I browsed through the various professional bulb catalogs from growers. These catalogs have quite reasonable prices, and many more bulb offerings than can be found in local garden center stores, however, they never contain photos and provide only sparse information about the growing requirements and behaviour of specific bulbs. Knowing more about the geographic origins, history, and growing preferences of various tulip types has made me bolder, and I am experimenting with many new bulbs this year.If you're new to gardening, you may not find this book very useful. Try the Eyewitness Garden Handbook "Bulbs" to get started growing bulbs, including tulips.