[.ca] The Tulip (ISBN 0747571902)

From Amazon.com:
In an auction held in Holland in February 1637, 99 lots of tulip bulbs fetched a staggering 90,000 guilders, more than $3.5 million in today's money. Tulipomania had reached its height, and its story is told in just one of the fascinating sections of Anna Pavord's wonderful book on this most seductive of flowers. Pavord's passion for the flower is evident from the opening pages of the book, where she tells of scrambling across the hillsides of Crete in search of an obscure, indigenous purple tulip. The story of the discovery of this tulip leads into Pavord's extraordinary history of this beautiful, enigmatic flower. As with all the best love stories, Pavord's is told from the perspective of the object of affection--in this case, the tulip--from its adoption by the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul in the 18th century to its present cultivation by the Wakefield Tulip Society. Along the way, incredible stories of people's investments in the flower emerge, the result, as Pavord explains, of a unique feature of the tulip. Its variegated colors are produced by a small parasitic aphid, which weakens the plant but produces its gorgeous hues. The tulipomania that 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 colors imaginable. 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

the topic seemed so interesting...:
I could not finish this book, and I thought it would be right up my alley. It was a sort of a mix of anecdotes and history. Personally I could have done without the anecdotes.

The real mystery is...:
The strangest thing about this book is the bit on the jacket where it says Anna Pavord makes her living as a journalist. The real mystery here isn't the puzzle of what caused the Dutch tulip mania (a genuinely enticing subject that Pavord somehow manages to render yawn-inducing), but who on earth would employ a woman with the world's most tedious prose style as a writer. Stick to the gardening, Ms Pavord, and leave writing books to people who are properly qualifed to do it!!

Interesting,but heavy.:
Ms.Pavord certainly does love her tulips - the narrative is strewn with latin names for every variety of tulip. Originally from the middle-east and very different to most other flowers, the discovery of strange multi-coloured hybrids that appeared spontaneously kept nurserymen occupied for years looking for the perfect specimen. This led to an outrageous inflation in the price, people selling their homes to buy one bulb! Written in a style that fails to hold one's attention, there is perhaps a tad more botanical detail than is necessary for the layman, but when one considers that this is the second book - a corollary to a scholarly exercise - on tulips, it is surprising that so little jargon is used. Very informative though lacking in story-telling. ***.

An excellent book ...:
I purchased this book abbout two years ago, and was very positively impressed. Every tulip lover should have a copy. "The Tulip" covers the Turkish tulipomania (I was unaware of it until I read this), gives a good account of the Dutch tulipomania, and a good account of the English interest in the flower. It emphasises the differences in taste of these three major groups of tulip admirers (the Turks liked narrow stiletto-like petals, for instance). There is considerable discussion of species tulips but one should look elsewhere for the rather interesting reproductive biology of the tulip. Where the cretinous one-star reviews came from I have no idea - malice perhaps, or perhaps very short attention spans.

A Horticultural Wonder: Anna Pavord's _The Tulip_:
One rarely thinks of a flower as the site of political, social, religious, and intellectual controversy. In The Tulip, Anna Pavord examines the commodification, collection, and mystery behind the tulip and the way in which this flower satisfied the curiosity prevalent in the early modern period. As Pavord shows throughout the book, the tulip is elevated from a mere botanical specimen to that of an object of curiosity. The flower caught on in an age of overwhelming interest in plants, especially in classification of plant species (67). Early gardens were methodically laid out in grids and species labeled and confined to a specific area, and Pavord refers to these early gardens as "horticultural Wunderkammer"(68). Indeed, it is easy to see the relationship of these gardens to the cabinets of wonders and curiosities cultivated by collectors of the Early Modern period. Each species of flower was treated as though it were a jewel, and tulips were "the most sought after, costly and prestigious flowers that a seventeenth-century gardener could possess" (68). Just like many of the emerging commodities in the Early Modern period, the tulip originated in the East (likely Turkey) where it would have existed as little more than a wildflower (26). It traveled the trade routes with merchants, and first appeared in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century (29). Pavord's text centers on a period in Dutch history known as "Tulipomania", peaking from 1634-1637. Her observations from this period are intriguing: 13,000 florins paid for a single tulip bulb, at a time when the average annual wage was about 150 florins (133); a bulb of a particular variety being sold for 5,400 guilders, the equivalent of fifteen years' wages for the average Amsterdam bricklayer (6); individuals mortgaging their houses to buy tulip bulbs, and weavers mortgaging their looms for the sought-after flower (152). Considering the common status of the flower today, it is hard to imagine that the tulip could have commanded such extreme measures from its admirers in the seventeenth century. In order to understand this outrageous behavior, it is necessary to view the tulip in the context of a society passionate about curiosity and knowledge. In The Tulip, a large part of the text centers on Pavord presenting the ways in which the tulip shares the quality of mystery associated with other curious objects of the period. The flower itself is indeed unusual, with its "diversity of flowers, even in a single colony of what must be a single species" (27). Indeed, what makes the tulip essential to the horticultural wonder cabinet and an object of curiosity to gardeners and taxonomists alike is its tendency to change, specifically what is known as "breaking". This process is when a "breeder" bulb suddenly changes from solid-colored flowers to "feathered" or "flamed" variegated flowers. The striped flowers, because they were far rarer, were much more highly valued (8). In the height of the European tulip obsession, it was not known what caused this transformation. Various theories were tested, including placing the desired pigments in the earth with the bulb to persuade it to change (48). The answer to this mystery was discovered in the 1920's: It is a type of virus spread by an aphid that causes the flowers to emerge suddenly striped (8). As an object of wonder, the tulip inspired the founding of horticultural societies, bulb auctions, and botanical classification through painting. This book provides a fascinating examination of the tulip and the socio-cultural environment that allowed it to motivate Tulipomania and engage the curiosity of gardeners, aristocrats and taxonomists alike. A useful way of approaching the text is by situating the tulip as an object of collection, like those in the wonder cabinets of the period. Without some knowledge about the era in which tulip-collecting occurred, this book would prove a bit tedious. However, to the early modern scholar, it is easy to understand how the tulip became a status symbol and pastime for the rich, an enigma for taxonomists, a delight to gardeners, and an economic commodity to merchants. Overall, this book is an exhaustive study of the commodification, collection, and mystery behind this flower, situated in an era of curiosity.