TULIP FLOWER

The tulip is a perennial, bulbous plant with showy flowers in the genus Tulipa, which
comprises 109 species and belongs to the family Liliaceae. The genus's native range
extends from as far west as Southern Europe, North Africa, Anatolia, and Iran to the
Northwest of China. The tulip's centre of diversity is in the Pamir, Hindu Kush, and Tien
Shan mountains. A number of species and many hybrid cultivars are grown in gardens, as
potted plants, or to display as fresh-cut flowers. Most cultivars of tulip are derived from
Tulipa gesneriana.
Tulips are spring-blooming perennials that grow from bulbs. Depending on the
species, tulip plants can grow as short as 4 inches (10 cm) or as high as 28 inches (71
cm). The tulip's large flowers usually bloom on scapes or subscaposestems that lack
bracts. Most tulips produce only one flower per stem, but a few species have up to four
flowers. The colourful and attractive, cup-shaped flower has three petals and three sepals,
which are often termed tepals because they are nearly identical. These six tepals are often
marked near the bases with darker colorings. Tulip flowers come in a wide variety of
colors, except pure blue (several tulips with "blue" in the name have a faint violet hue).
The flowers have six distinct, basifixed stamens with filaments shorter than the tepals.
Each stigma of the flower has three distinct lobes, and the ovaries are superior with three
chambers. The tulip's fruit is a capsule with a leathery covering and an ellipsoid to
subglobose shape. Each capsule contains numerous flat, disc-shaped seeds in two rows
per chamber. These light to dark brown seeds have very thin seed coats and endosperm
that does not normally fill the entire seed.
Tulip stems can have up to a few leaves, with larger species tending to have multiple
leaves and smaller species having none. Plants typically have 2 to 6 leaves, with some
species having up to 12 leaves. The tulip's foliage is strap-shaped with a waxy coating
and alternately arranged on the stem. These fleshy blades have a light to medium green
color and are linear to oblong in shapeTulip bulbs usually grow on the ends of stolons,
and the bulbs' tunicate (dry and papery) coverings may or may not have hairs.
 Although tulips are often associated with The Netherlands, commercial cultivation of
the flower began in the Ottoman Empire. The tulip, or lale (from Persian ‫لله‬, lâleh) as it
is also called in Iran and Turkey, is a flower indigenous to a vast area encompassing parts
of Africa, Asia, and Europe. The word tulip, which earlier appeared in English in forms
such as tulipa or tulipant, entered the language by way of French tulipe and its obsolete
form tulipan or by way of Modern Latin tulīpa, from Ottoman Turkish tülbend ("muslin"
or "gauze"), and is ultimately derived from Persian dulband ("turban").

Tulips are indigenous to mountainous areas with temperate climates and need a
period of cool dormancy. They do best in climates with long, cool springs and early
summers. Although perennials, they are often replanted annualy in warmer areas of the
world.

The bulbs are typically planted around late summer and fall in well-drained soils,
normally from 4 inches (10 cm) to 8 inches (20 cm) deep, depending on the type planted.
In parts of the world that do not have long cool springs and early summers though, the
bulbs are often planted up to 12 inches (300 mm) deep. This provides some protection
from the heat of summer and tends to force the plants to regenerate one large bulb each
year instead of many smaller non-blooming ones. This can extend the life of the plant in
warmer areas by a few years, but it does not stave off degradation in bulb size and the
eventual death of the plant.

Tulips can be propagated through offsets, seeds or micropropagation. Offsets and

tissue culture methods are means of asexual propagation for producing genetic clones of
the parent plant, which maintains cultivar integrity. Seed-raised plants show greater
variation, and seeds are most often used to propagate species and subspecies or to create
new hybrids. Many tulip species can cross-pollinate with each other, and when wild tulip
populations overlap with other species or subspecies, they often hybridize and create
mixed populations. Most tulip cultivars are complex hybrids and actually sterile. Those
plants that do produce seeds most often have offspring dissimilar to the parents.
 Growing salable tulips from offsets requires a year or more of growth before plants
are large enough to flower. Tulips grown from seeds often need five to eight years of
growth before plants are flowering size. Commercial growers usually harvest the tulip
bulbs in late summer and grade them into sizes; bulbs large enough to flower are sorted
and sold, while smaller bulbs are sorted into sizes and replanted. Holland is the main
producer of commercially sold plants, producing as many as 3 billion bulbs annually.

Although it is unclear who first brought the tulip to Northwestern Europe, the most
widely accepted story is that it was Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, an ambassador for
Ferdinand I of Germany to Suleyman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire. He
remarked in a letter that he saw "an abundance of flowers everywhere; Narcissus,
hyacinths and those in Turkish called Lale, much to our astonishment because it was
almost midwinter, a season unfriendly to flowers." However, in 1559, an account by
Conrad Gessner described tulips flowering in Augsburg, Bavaria in the garden of
Councillor Herwart. Due to the nature of the tulip's growing cycle, tulip bulbs are
generally removed from the ground in June and must be replanted by September to
endure the winter. While possible, it is doubtful that Busbecq could successfully have had
the tulip bulbs harvested, shipped to Germany, and replanted between his first sighting of
them in March 1558 and Gessner's description the following year. As a result, Busbecq's
account of the supposed first sighting of tulips by a European is possibly spurious.

Carolus Clusius planted tulips at the Imperial Botanical Gardens of Vienna in 1573
and later at the Leiden University's newly established Hortus Botanicus, where he was
appointed director. There he planted some of his tulip bulbs in late 1593. As a result,
1594 is considered the official date of the tulip's first flowering in The Netherlands,
despite reports of the flowers being cultivated in private gardens in Antwerp and
Amsterdam two or three decades earlier. These tulips at Leiden would eventually lead to
both Tulip mania and the commercial tulip industry in Holland.

Another account of the origin of the tulip in Western Europe is of Lopo Vaz de
Sampaio, governor of the Portuguese possessions in India. After attempting to usurp
power from the rightful governor, Sampaio was forced to return to Portugal in disgrace.
Supposedly, he took tulip bulbs back to Portugal with him from Sri Lanka. This story
does not hold up to scrutiny though because tulips do not occur in Sri Lanka and the
island itself is far from the route Sampaio's ships would have likely taken.

Regardless of how the flower originally arrived in Europe, its popularity soared
quickly. Carolus Clusius is largely responsible for the spread of tulip bulbs in the final
years of the sixteenth century. He finished writing the first major work on tulips in 1592,
and he made note of the variations in colour that help make the tulip so admired. While
occupying a chair as a faculty member in the school of medicine at the University of
Leiden, Clusius planted both a teaching garden and private plot of his ownwith tulip
bulbs. In 1596 and 1598, Clusius suffered thefts from his garden, with over a hundred
bulbs stolen in a single raid.

Between 1634 and 1637, the early enthusiasm for the new flowers triggered a
speculative frenzy now known as the tulip mania. Tulips would become so expensive that
they were treated as a form of currency. Around this time, the ceramic tulipiere was
devised for the display of cut flowers stem by stem bouquets displayed in vases were rare
until the 19th century, although such vases and bouquets, usually including tulips, often
appeared in Dutch still-life painting. To this day, tulips are associated with The
Netherlands, and the cultivated forms of the tulip are often called "Dutch tulips." In
addition to the tulip industry and tulip festivals, The Netherlands has the world's largest
permanent display of tulips at Keukenhof, although the display is only open to the public
seasonally.