Tulip

Group: Flowers

Odor profile: floral note recreated in the lab, with the subtle lightly citrusy touch of real tulips

This holy temple’s door –
the spring sun flings it open wide
And streams upon the floor.

Gusai

When tulips start blooming the Earth becomes happy seeing these smiling bells looking at the sky. They can be yellow, red, purple, pink, orange, white, etc. The species native range includes North Africa, and Asia from Anatolia and Iran in the West to Northeast of China and Siberia. The centre of diversity of the genus is in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountains and the steppes of Kazakhstan.

A number of species and many hybrid cultivars are grown in gardens, used as pot plants or as fresh cut flowers. Most cultivars of tulip are derived from Tulipa gesneriana.

The earliest mentioning of tulips we can find in Persian literature. It was known as “Turban”. Most of the Persian poets praised this flower for the ability to be so gentle, peaceful and elegant.

We are told that in Persia the tulip, whose blossom in its native country is scarlet, while the centre of its glowing cup is black, is used to express warm affection; and, when sent by a lover, will convey to the object of his attachment the idea that like this flower, his face is warm and his heart is consumed as a coal.
~ Anne Pratt, The Field, the Garden and the Woodland, 1838

There is one beautiful legend about this flower. Long time ago the tulip flower was always closed and none of the forces could open the bud. It also kept happiness inside.

One day a woman came to the meadow to play with her kid where the tulip grew. The kid was running around and laughing. When he came to the tulip and took a look at it, the flower opened up… The kid’s smile was able to do the miracle that nobody else could do…

Since then people bring tulips to make somebody happier.

Turkey has tulip festival every year. In 1554 the Austrian Emperor’s messenger came to visit Turkish sultan. As they walked in the garden, the messenger noticed a delicate elegant beautiful flower. He bought some bulbs and brought them to Vienna to the Medicinal herb Garden.

Afterwards from Austria tulips appeared in Germany, Holland, France and other European countries. That was the first step for tulip to become popular.
French poet Théophile Gautier wrote:

I am the tulip, Holland's choicest flower.
The thrifty Fleming - such my loveliness -
Pays for my perfect bulb a price no less
Than diamond. Lordly lineage is my dower.

Like to a proud Yolande in her young hour
Of pomp and kirtle bright, upon my dress
Of dewy crimson crossed with silver fess,
I bear the painted blazon of my power.

The gardener divine with fingers deft
Spun golden beams of iridescent noon,
And liquid depths of purple fashioned up,
To make for me a robe of royal weft.

Peerless I stand - yet grieve that Nature boon
Poured never perfume in my shining cup.

But Holland really “adopted” this flower. The country’s weather and soil conditions matched tulip’s needs. As a result tulips were planted everywhere. It attracted intrigues and fairy tales. The “tulip-mania” was spreading like wildfire…

There are now over 3,000 different registered varieties of cultivated tulips bred from over 100 species with different shapes, sizes, colors and color combination, blooming times, fragrances… So many ways to be elegant!