Tulip

Tulip (Tulipa) is a genus of about 100 species of flowering plants in the family Liliaceae. Its region includes southern Europe, north Africa, and Asia from Anatolia and Iran in the east to northeast of China. more...

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The centre of diversity of the genus is in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountains and the steppes of Kazakhstan.

They are perennial bulbous plants growing to 10–70 centimetres (4–27 in) tall, with a small number of strap-shaped, waxy-textured, usually glaucous green leaves and large flowers with six petals. The fruit is a dry capsule containing numerous flat disc-shaped seeds.

Origin of the Name

Although tulips are associated with Holland, both the flower and its name originated in the Persian Empire. The tulip is actually not a Dutch flower as many people tend to believe. The tulip, or "Laleh" as it's called in Persian, is a flower indigenous to Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and other parts of Central Asia. A Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the 16th century, who was also a great floral enthusiast, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, got their very names because of their Persian origins. Tulips were brought to Europe in the 16th century; the word tulip, which earlier in English appeared in such forms as tulipa or tulipant, came to us by way of French tulipe and its obsolete form tulipan or by way of Modern Latin tulīpa, from Ottoman Turkish tülbend, "muslin, gauze." (The English word turban, first recorded in English in the 16th century, can also be traced to Ottoman Turkish tülbend.) The Turkish word for gauze, with which turbans can be wrapped, seems to have been used for the flower because a fully opened tulip was thought to resemble a turban.

Cultivation

Tulips cannot be grown in the open in tropical climates, as they require a cold winter season to grow successfully. Manipulation of the tulip's growing temperature can, however, allow growers to "force" tulips to flower earlier than they normally would.

Some historical cultivars have had a striped, "feathered", "flamed", or variegated flower, as in the illustration below. While some modern varieties also display multicoloured patterns, this results from a natural change in the upper and lower layers of pigment in the tulip flower. Historical variegated varieties - such as those admired in the Dutch tulipomania gained their delicately feathered patterns from an infection with Tulip Breaking potyvirus. The mosaic virus is carried by green peach aphids, Myzus persicae, an insect common in European gardens of the seventeenth century, in which peach trees were often a prominent feature. While the virus produces fantastically beautiful flowers, it also causes the plant to sicken and die slowly. Today, it has been almost completely eradicated from growers' fields. The Black Tulip was the title of a historical romance by Alexandre Dumas, père (1850), in which the city of Haarlem has a reward outstanding for the first grower who can produce a truly black tulip. This fascination with growing a black tulip, a biologically impossible task, was historically accurate to the tulipomania in which the novel is set.

Read more at Wikipedia.org