What did squirrels do before we started planting bulbs? Where Byzantine gardeners pestered by them when they turned to tulips as an ornamental? Did the Seljuq Turks who overran their empire and so notably cultivated them equally plagued? And while lilacs came from the same source via Vienna to Holland, a recently proposed theory has the tulips of Amsterdam coming instead from Andalusia in Spain, then part of the vast Ottoman Empire. “It is probable that a known 11th century agronomist from Toledo, ibn Bassal (‘the onion-vendor’s son’) played a protagonist role in the introduction and first cultivation of the tulip in Iberian territory,” researchers wrote in the magazine Economic Botany.
