WhatFinger


Children's Gardening

Tulips Came from Turkey



After being sheltered in Ottawa during the Second World War while their country was under the heel of the Nazis, the Dutch royal family demonstrated their appreciation by presenting Canada’s capital city with a gift of tulips. Ian Fleming, the English writer who created James Bond, called Ottawa a grey city. He can’t have visited during tulip time. Every May Ottawa comes alive with – no exaggeration – millions of bulbs. Indeed, gardens everywhere from coast to coast are aglow with brilliantly coloured tulips. And almost every one of the bulbs that produced them came from the Netherlands.

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Strangely, wild tulips and their cultivated cousins originated far, far away from the damp seashores of Europe’s North Sea. Their very name is said to derive from the Turkish tulband, a turban, in reference to the shape of these flowers. This gives a clue as to who first selected them from the wild and grew them in their gardens. While the Persians of today’s Iran first took to tulips, it was the Turks who raised them to perfection. And since the Turks occupied much of the principle areas in which the 100 or so of wild species tulips originated from – eastern Europe to central Asia – they had happy hunting grounds. This was in what Europeans called the Middle Ages when gardening was, like most everything else in the West, quite frankly primitive. Warlike, yes and it is interesting that a leading Turkish ruler and specialist in bulb raising was known to his people as Suleyman the Magnificent but to western Europeans as Suleyman the Conqueror. In the middle of the 16th-century, Austrian diplomats came to the Turkish court. There they were astounded by the gardens and what was cultivated in them by the royal gardeners. Not only were there tulips, but lilacs, roses, daffodils, hyacinths, carnations and many other flowers later to become favourites in the West. Both lilacs and tulips came back with the diplomats to Vienna. There they amazed the court when cultured in the imperial gardens under the care of a botanical expert from the Low Countries. A few years later, this man, Carolus Clusius, joined Leiden University in Holland. He took tulips with him. So started the immense Dutch flower bulb industry. Meanwhile, the Turks continued to enjoy tulips. The spring flowers shows were greeted with great pleasure, none more so than that held in the sultan’s palace courtyard. Stands were erected to support vases of tulips interspersed with goblets of coloured water and cages of canaries. Some flowers were formed into towering arrangements. Others were made into ornate patterns on the courtyard’s surface. As dusk fell, all admirers were banished as the gates of the palace were drawn closed. Slaves bearing flaming torches lit the scene as the ladies of the palace entered to enjoy the sights and scents unseen by the public. An adventurous English lady, travelled alone and in safety during the 18th-century to view similar scenes. In her diary she recorded the parades leading up to such shows in which the royal gardeners occupied prominent positions. How much she, the sultan and his subjects would appreciate Ottawa in May today. Tulips everywhere, colourful floats on the Rideau Canal, and entertainments although perhaps the gardeners responsible for the principal attraction are not seen so prominently. For more on the Ottawa Tulip Festival, the world’s largest, visit [url=http://www.tulipfestival.ca]http://www.tulipfestival.ca[/url]


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Wes Porter -- Bio and Archives

Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.


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