Organic flower grower and florist Polly Nicholson’s new book ‘The Tulip Garden’ is a lavishly illustrated tribute to tulips, published by Phaidon. Ahead of the book launch at the museum on Tuesday 9 April, we’re delighted to share this exclusive excerpt from the book introducing the history of tulips and their journey from Turkey to the Netherlands:
I have been growing tulips fervently, even feverishly, at my home in Wiltshire for the past fifteen years. Blackland Park (Blacklands for short) is a small, ancient estate that sits at the foot of the Marlborough Downs in southwestern England. The chalk downlands sweeping above us are rich in wildflowers owing to the low level of nutrients in the poor, sparse soil (in richer soil, they would be outcompeted by grasses), but we garden on rich, black soil – hence the estate’s name – apparently the lucky beneficiaries of the sediment that has been deposited by the River Marden over millennia. This provides us with the perfect environment in which to grow a host of cultivated flowers, with tulips at the forefront. In the middle of the property sits our family home, a Georgian manor house built in the 1760s of honeyed Bath stone. Radiating from the house are a series of walled gardens and a coach house from where I run my cut-flower business, Bayntun Flowers (after my maiden name, Bayntun-Coward). The 2.4 hectare (6 acre) garden is enclosed on the northern and eastern sides by towering walls of brick and ashlar, while the river, widened into a picturesque oxbow lake, creates a natural boundary to the south. Weathered estate railings provide a barrier to the west between the garden and our flock of Hebridean sheep, which would wreak havoc should it gain entry.
Within this protected enclave I have established naturalized plantings of species tulips, such as the native yellow woodland Tulipa sylvestris, in herbaceous beds and meadow grass, and created perennial plantings of lily-flowered, viridiflora and other cultivars that are guaranteed to flower year upon year. Huge planters full of annual tulip displays stand sentinel at entry points into the garden, and clustered everywhere are containers of historic varieties that date back to the sixteenth century and spill out into rows of beds in a flower field within the greater parkland. My life has been overtaken by tulips, in a good way, like that of many a convert before me.
Tulips first appeared in art and literature in the Middle East almost a thousand years ago, when they were immortalized in the poetry of the Persian polymath Omar Khayyam and on Seljuk tilework excavated from the banks of Lake Beyşehir in southwestern Turkey. Those specimens, however, were representations of the original species (or botanical) tulips that grew wild in rugged mountain foothills or wide valley floors. The flower’s cultivation in captivity began in earnest in the fifteenth century, when tulips were gathered in their thousands from their native habitats and introduced to Turkey’s imperial palace gardens for the delectation of successive Ottoman emperors, for whom they were the ultimate expression of status and power. Their characteristic shape, generally depicted in red or (disingenuously) blue, was embroidered on garments and prayer mats, adorned the tiled interiors of palaces and mosques (most famously at the Sultan Ahmet Camii, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul) and featured in delicately painted miniatures, on leather and lacquer book bindings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. In these early depictions the petals (technically tepals) were shown as exaggerated dagger points, in contrast to the softer, blunter silhouettes of today’s tulips, but they are still instantly recognizable as a tulip. One of the most striking tulips we grow at Blacklands, Tulipa ‘Cornuta’ (syn. T. acuminata), exemplifies the Ottoman-era tulip, with spidery red and yellow petals that twist and taper to needle-sharp tips.
Tulip bulbs travel well, given their small size, neat structure and protective tunic, and as the tulip continued its journey along the Silk Road into Europe it captured the hearts and imaginations of those who encountered it. Western herbalists, botanists and horticulturalists were – and still are – relentless in their quest for the ‘perfect’ tulip: one that is deep black or blue, has completely symmetrical markings or, today, one that can be grown hydroponically and transported seamlessly across the world as cheaply as possible. The Flemish herbalist Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522–1592) is said to have introduced tulips into Europe through his role as Viennese ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the court of Suleyman the Magnificent (and to have given them the name tulipan; see below), but the botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), director of the botanic garden at Leiden, the Netherlands, was intrinsic to the plant’s spread across Europe. He gave some precious tulip bulbs to fellow gardeners, but was known to have guarded his coveted collection by day and night – to no avail, since it was repeatedly raided by thieves. That caused the bulbs to be dispersed across the continent, taking root and becoming endlessly hybridized by individuals hungry for the dramatically patterned broken or rectified tulips that eventually led to the economic bubble known as Tulipmania (1634–7).
For such a seemingly simple flower, the tulip has a long and complex history, and I would direct those who wish to be immersed in its fascinating story to Anna Pavord’s book The Tulip (1999). I am a grower first and foremost, and would never be able to delve as deep as my friend and mentor has done. Even the origins of the name are confusing, for in Turkey a tulip is called lale. The European terms (among them Dutch tulp, German Tulpe, Spanish tulipán, English tulip) probably derive from tülbend, the Ottoman Turkish for ‘turban’, because of the obvious similarity in shape or perhaps because it was the fashion for a sultan to tuck a tulip into the folds of his head covering. To complicate matters, the tulip displays tremendous variation in the wild, confounding generations of plant-hunters and taxonomists who have struggled to make sense of so many similar, yet slightly different versions of a flower found growing in one isolated area. The early herbariums (collections of dried specimens, mounted and classified) are full of tulips whose names contradict one another from today’s perspective. When I press my tulips each spring for my own herbarium – one of my favourite activities – I am grateful to those who have continuously strived to create order out of the chaos (most notably the ‘father of taxonomy’, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, 1707–1778), allowing me to label them with conviction – at least until the next round of classifications starts and the boundaries are shifted once more.
Tulips are today grouped into sixteen divisions, which accommodate all the species and hybridized tulips in the genus, and examples from every division are represented in our garden and flower field at Blacklands. The divisions and registrations are organized by KAVB (Koninklijke Algemeene Vereniging voor Bloembollencultuur, the Dutch Royal General Bulbgrowers’ Association), which operates an international register of tulip names and publishes classified lists. A few of the tulips I grow are not officially registered (for example T. ‘Rubens’ and T. ‘Saskia’, both from my Dutch Historic collection), and have therefore escaped the association’s grasp, but the KAVB is an invaluable resource that I consult almost daily and depend on for my research. The many Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) resources, including the Plant Finder, are also crucial. In addition, old bulb catalogues, issued by such companies as John Lewis Childs in New York and Barr & Sons in England during the nineteenth century as amateur gardening increased in popularity, have also proved useful for gathering information on individual cultivars, so that profiles can be built up.
The Netherlands have become synonymous with the tulip. There, bulb companies have remained in the same family for many generations, and accumulated expertise passes from hand to hand. On a trip in 2023 to Hortus Bulborum, a living museum of tulips near Amsterdam, I was delighted to finally meet its chairman, who introduced himself as Mr Apeldoorn. I thought he was joking, given that T. ‘Apeldoorn’, a scarlet Darwin Hybrid with large egg-shaped flowers, was one of the most popular and persistent tulips of the twentieth century. But he was serious, he really was an Apeldoorn, and my belief was confirmed that tulip-growing runs in the blood, echoing the continuous thread of DNA that is passed from bulb to bulb each year.
Considering my passion for tending tulips (and flowers in general), one would think that growing would be in my blood, but it most definitely is not. I grew up in the English countryside 8 km (5 miles) outside the city of Bath (about an hour’s drive from where I now live), and I don’t remember seeing a single tulip in our garden or house throughout my entire childhood. My parents loved trees and lawns, but they would not describe themselves as green-fingered and had limited success at growing plants, apart from a row of rather formal flowerpots containing bright red geraniums (actually Pelargonium), white Lobularia maritima (sweet alyssum) and blue Lobelia erinus (trailing lobelia) – all very patriotic. As a result, my sister and I spent our childhoods gathering bunches of wildflowers, such as Primula vulgaris (wild primrose) and Viola odorata (sweet violet), from the hedgerows, for the kitchen table.
This quest for flowers has continued throughout my whole life. It ran as a thread through my university years, when I studied English literature with medieval art and architecture and would seek out flowers carved into the thirteenth-century misericords at Exeter Cathedral (I didn’t find a tulip there, nor in the margins of any medieval European manuscript); through my first career as a specialist in the book department at the auction house Sotheby’s, where I was drawn to gardening and cookery books; and later, when I retrained in horticulture at the English Gardening School, based at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London.
When I moved with my husband and family to Blacklands in 2007 I was faced with a series of yawning herbaceous beds, in a sequence of walled gardens within 40 hectares (100 acres) of ancient parkland. The prospect of making this my own was overwhelming for a young mother of four children, and my way of putting off the serious business of creating planting plans was to cram the borders with tulip bulbs – an approach that also meant I could fill the house with blooms the following spring. I was delighted with my first forays into flower-growing, believing the success was all thanks to my new horticultural qualification, and little realizing that a tulip bulb carries within it all it needs to produce a guaranteed display for one season. The rich black, alluvial soil played a part, but only a small one, since tulips that are grown as annuals demand little from their location apart from some sun and adequate drainage. In truth, I wasn’t very interested in soil structure back then. This has changed, and I am now obsessed with soil health and the environmental aspects of gardening, as much as I am with the flowers themselves.
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Polly Nicholson: The Tulip Garden book launch takes place on Tuesday 9 April, 7pm. Tickets available to attend in person or watch online (live or on demand): book tickets
The book is also available to pre-order from our online bookshop:
Buy the book
Excerpted from THE TULIP GARDEN: Growing and Collecting Species, Rare and Annual Varieties
© 2024 by Polly Nicholson. Photography © 2024 by Andrew Montgomery. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved.