Tulip

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
The Tulip a meticulously researched and delightfully descriptive history of a flower that, as far back as the 13th century, has not only been inspiring poetry and drama but also charting political upheavals, illuminating social behavior, mirroring economic booms and busts, and plotting the ebb and flow of religious persecutions.

Throughout The Tulip, Anna Pavord, gardening correspondent for Britain's The Independent and the author of The Flowering Year and Gardening Companion, traces the history of the flower as best she can. She confesses that it is a particularly rebellious and "unruly genus," continually slipping "out from under the careful parameters laid by botanists and taxonomists" -- and perhaps historians as well. Her sources are the historical writings of each period as well as the art, tapestries, and other items on which the tulip has been depicted through the ages.

Although tulips were praised by Persian poets as early as the 13th century, they did not become the celebrated emblems they are today until the 15th and 16th centuries under the Ottoman Empire. Mesmerized by the splendid colors of the tulip and its mysterious ability to change colors and patterns, sultans began compulsively planting the brilliant flowers in gardens throughout Constantinople and in their own royal pleasure gardens and orchards. With the help of travelers, royal ambassadors from Europe, religious refugees, and curious botanists, the flowers were soon flourishing throughout Europe, especially in Holland, and eventually in the United States.

Pavord supplements her tribute to the tulip with full chapters on each variety, including height, appearance, region, origin, and planting instructions, as well as a chapter on garden tulips. She also includes a detailed "Chronology of Tulips."

Lara Webb is a freelance editor and author of The Best Friend's Guide to Getting Married.

Anne Raver

This is no dry, botanical tome, though its botany is gracefully woven into the tale. The Tulip reads more like an adventure story.
— The New York Times

Economist Review

It took seven years of travel and research to create this magnifcent history of the genus Tulipa, its 1,200 species and the financial madness it once inspired.

Emma Tennant

Anna Pavord has written a magnum opus. She has taken up the challenge of writing about every aspect of the extraordinary genus tulipa. The search for truth has led her into some fascinating byways of history.
— Literary Review

House & Garden

[A] verbally and visually ravishing book.

Richard Rudgley

...[W]ritten by a modern high priestess of the cult [and] destined to achieve Biblical status....Although Pavord is a willing victim of tulipomania her book does not evoke the crazed world of fanatics... —London Review of Books

Publishers Weekly

This splendidly extravagant history is only the latest example of how far an obsession with Queen Tulipa can lead. Pavord (The Flowering Year), the gardening correspondent for the Independent, searched the world's libraries and archives and trekked over war-torn mountainsides to put together an astonishing bouquet of economic and cultural lore, grand historic trends and horticultural exotica. Her witty, frighteningly erudite story starts in Turkey, where Sultans of old held nightly entertainments in gardens lit by mirrored lanterns and required guests to dress in colors to match the tulips. Holland of 1634-1637 saw the famous Tulipomania, during which a single bulb could be traded for the price of the most expensive house in Amsterdam. Seventeenth-century French ladies of fashion wore tulips like jewels (and paid as much for them), and monographists puzzled endlessly over why plain blossoms could suddenly transform themselves into feathered and flamed curiosities. As for Enlightenment England, supposedly sensible people were not immune to the rage, and burgeoning florists' societies were dedicated to growing the flower in the island's wet and clammy soil. Though this isn't a how-to manual, gardeners will appreciate the encyclopedic descriptions of wild species and garden varieties of tulips. Lastly, the sumptuous illustrations covering five centuries of tulip-inspired art and artifacts will dazzle browsers and botanists alike. About much more than a lovely flower, this book will give readers a panoramic eyeful of culture, aesthetics, politics and economics--in short, the spectrum of human endeavor as revealed in the passage of the tulip through history.

Library Journal

Pavord (The New Kitchen Garden) has clearly been touched by some of the madness that appears throughout the history of the tulip, and her simple title belies the complexity of the story she tells. She traces the fascination for this flower from the first mania for its use in 14th-century Turkey to its evolution as a common garden flower. Using contemporary sources, which also supply some of the lavish illustrations, she documents the tulip's introduction to Western Europe in the 15th century. She also tells the personal stories of the gardeners who devoted their lives and fortunes to developing new varieties. The tulip's mysterious habit of "breaking" and developing new forms and colors was the basis for speculative crazes, first with the Dutch in the 17th century and then later the English and French, since the gardener who grew a desirable new variety could make a fortune. The second half of the book is a comprehensive listing and description of all tulip species as well as some of the 2600 varieties of garden tulips still in general cultivation. -- Daniel Starr, Museum of Modern Art Lib., New York

House & Garden

[A] verbally and visually ravishing book.

Kirkus Reviews

A disarming, captivating history of the tulip—a byzantine story rich in subtexts, from Pavord, gardening correspondent for the Independent in England (The Flowering Year). "What is this Toolip? A well complexion'd stink, an ill favour wrapt up in pleasant colours," muttered a contemptuous English gardener a few centuries back. He stood pretty much alone, as Pavord makes delightfully evident, for long before their introduction into western Europe during the 16th century, tulips were the hottest floral ticket around. Pavord details the background of the tulip, which is as flamboyant as the bloom itself: It is wild to a swath that cuts from Istanbul to Samarkand to Tienshan; it is feathered or flamed, nipped or spidery; a shape-shifter, it is drab one year, then wildly sexy the next, flushed with satiny green. The flower was an Ottoman fixation, an ever-present motif from common tile work to Suleyman's armor; it spawned floral societies-and poetry, artwork, and debate-300 years before the Dutch laid eyes on it. And tulips instantly besotted western Europe, arriving just in time to cash in on the Age of Curiosities, when the rare became stylish overnight. Pavord charts (and illustrates with 150 color plates) its rise to fame in France, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands; she traces the flower's appearance in paintings, literature, and botanical tracts; discusses how it commanded absurd prices and became an object of satire; details the tulip's abrupt fall from grace, only to be rescued from the aristocratic scrap heap by hobby florists.

Clearly, Pavord is smitten herself. Like the best of monomaniacs, she engages readers with her obsession and knows how to apply tongueto cheek: Any tulip worth inspection has "the need for a good shape and a good bottom." This floral portrait is alive with wonder; even the concluding catalogue raisonné of species is a work of passion.