The Tulip - Hardcover

Anna Pavord

3.4

386 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747542961 ISBN 13: 9780747542964

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1999

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The Tulip is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has made men mad. Greed, desire, anguish, devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian steppes to the world-wide phenomenon it is today. The US alone imports three thousand million tulip bulbs each year, Germany and France even more. Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? The author, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, has spent six years looking for answers. No other flower has ever carried so much baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution. Roaming through Asia, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the author tells how the tulip arrived from Turkey and took the whole of Western Europe by storm. In the petals of the exquisite English florists' tulips, still exhibited in competition by members of the Wakefield Tulip Society in Yorkshire, runs the blood of flowers first grown by John Evelyn in the middle of the seventeenth century. Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, the book also features descriptions of eighty wild-species tulips and several hundred garden varieties. This beautifully produced and irresistible volume will become a bible, a unique source book, a universal gift book and a joy to all who possess it. Author note: Anna Pavord is the gardening correspondent for the Independent, and the author of widely praised gardening books including The Flowering Year and Gardening Companion. As well as writing for the Observer for twenty years, she has contributed to Country Life, Country Living, and Elle Decoration, and is an associate editor of Gardens Illustrated. She lives in Dorset, England, in an old rectory with a large garden that she has been developing for twenty years. Constantly experimenting with new combinations of flowers and foliage, she finds it

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Review:

In an auction held in Holland in February 1637, 99 lots of tulip bulbs fetched a staggering 90,000 guilders, more than �6 million in today's money. Tulipomania had reached its height, and its story is told in just one of the fascinating sections of Anne Pavord's wonderful book on this most seductive of flowers, The Tulip.

Pavord's passion for the flower is evident from the opening pages of the book, as she scrambles across the hillsides of Crete in search of an obscure, indigenous purple tulip, whose discovery leads into Pavord's extraordinary history of this beautiful yet enigmatic flower. As with all the best love stories, Pavord's is told from the perspective of the tulip, from its adoption by the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul, including the downfall of Ahmed III in 1730, so indulgent was his desire for the flower, to the present cultivation of the flower by the Wakefield Tulip Society.

Along the way incredible stories of people's investment in the flower emerge, the result, as Pavord explains, of the unique feature of the tulip. Its variegated colours are produced by a small parasitic aphid, which weakens the plant, but produces its gorgeous colours. The Tulipomania which gripped 17th-century Europe was a form of futures trading, as people purchased tulip bulbs at increasingly inflated prices with the hope that they would flower into the most beautiful and kaleidoscopic colours imaginable. The Tulip is an extraordinary book, beautifully illustrated and offering a fascinating story of our obsession with the most ephemeral of objects; buying tulip bulbs will never be the same again! --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"Splendidly extravagant history...an astonishing bouquet of economic and cultural lore, grand historic trends and horticultural exotica." --"Publishers Weekly" "Visually stunning" --"New Yorker" "Fascinating and sumptuous...an epic drama, a true tale that spans continents and centuries, shows humankind at its worst and its best, with heroes and villains galore." --"Seattle Post-Intelligencer" "A wondrous account... remarkable." --"Seattle Weekly" "Verbally and visually ravishing book." --"House & Garden" ""The Tulip" reads more like an adventure story, written against a backdrop of a 16th-and 17th-century Europe..."--"Desert Sun"

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