Tag: tulips

From “Rembrandt and Florists Tulips” in Tulips: An Illustrated Identifier and Guide to Cultivation by Stanley Killingback: 

“Many will suggest that [Rembrandt and Florists] tulips… are now obsolete but they are still popular with a good number of people who would disagree with that view.

“All these tulips are ‘broken’ or ‘rectified’, which means that the flower’s anthocyanin pigment, which had been diffused over the whole petal, gathers in certain restricted areas. Stripes and splashes are the result, with the ground between white or yellow and no longer modified by the anthocyanin. This breaking we now know is caused by TBV (tulip breaking virus) and is transmitted from one plant to another mostly by aphis but possibly by other forms of life.

“These broken tulips became known as florists tulips in the seventeenth century, when the effects were first noticed. They were divided into six classes. Roses had white grounds with pink to crimson scarlet markings. Bijbloemens had white grounds with purple markings and Bizarres had yellow grounds with red and brown markings. Each colour group had two classes, feathered and flamed. The markings of a feathered flower are confined to the edges of the petal. The edges should be continuous and finely pencilled but the depth may vary considerably with the variety….

“These broken tulips of various forms had their own classification until 1969, when they were all amalgamated into one section and given the name of Rembrandt tulips.”

From “Tulips” by Margaret Belle Houston in The Lyric South: An Anthology of Recent Poetry from the South (1928), edited by Addison Hibbard:

Tulips in the window,
     For all the world to see!
Red and yellow tulips
     Draw the heart of me!

I would believe in any folk,
     Whatever their neighbors said,
With tulips in their window,
     And a little garden bed.

I would marry any man,
     And serve him with a will,
Who, living all alone, should plant
     Tulips on his sill.

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Hello!

I missed photographing the tulips at Oakland Cemetery last year. I think they came and went betwixt several rounds of severe thunderstorms we had in March and April, because I only found bare stems with disembodied petals scattered on the ground when I went looking for them. They grow in a flat, open area of the property not far from daffodils I posted previously, so I suppose they weren’t well-protected from wind and rain and didn’t much appreciate getting storm-beaten.

So I was glad to find some standing tall this year, and pulled together these very many photographs of two or three different variants, all likely Tulipa gesneriana, or Garden Tulips. The tulips in the first twelve photos below are fully red, and they’re followed by a mix of bicolor red and yellow. I think that the bicolors may be two different kinds, since some of the flower petals are rounded but others come to a point or exhibit a bit of ruffling at the edges. For the last seven photos, we get a look at the asymmetrically colored tulip’s innards, which show how the alternating red and yellow colors emerge in random patterns like those that appear to have been painted on the outside.

Part of the quotation at the top of this post — “Bizarres had yellow grounds with red and brown markings. Each colour group had two classes, feathered and flamed.” — seems to describe them, and as you might guess, the idea that bicolor red and yellow tulips could be called “Bizarres” was very appealing. “Bizarres” in this context, though, probably refers more to a historical name for tulips like this, and the name was commonly used to segregate similar varieties during Tulip Mania of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

“Rembrandt” was another term to describe them, and the name — after the painter Rembrandt and his use of rich, contrasting colors — was also once a tulip division. Treating the name as a tulip division still persists but is no longer technically correct; while referring to tulips with colors like the red and yellow ones below as “Rembrandt Tulips” or “Rembrandt-type Tulips” is still common. Click here if you would like to see some Internet variations that sport similar patterns in different colors identified as Rembrandts; or here if you like to see them by yet another common name — Flame Tulips — which certainly fits their appearance.

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “May-Day” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues….

Hither rolls the storm of heat;
I feel its finer billows beat
Like a sea which me infolds;
Heat with viewless fingers moulds,
Swells, and mellows, and matures,
Paints, and flavors, and allures,
Bird and brier inly warms,
Still enriches and transforms,
Gives the reed and lily length,
Adds to oak and oxen strength,
Transforming what it doth infold,
Life out of death, new out of old…
Fires gardens with a joyful blaze
Of tulips, in the morning’s rays….

From Garden Flora: The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants In Your Garden by Noel Kingsbury:

“The extraordinary outburst of financial speculation in the province of Holland during the 1630s (‘tulipomania‘) is well known. Although still theoretically under Spanish rule, the Dutch had been building up an extremely successful economy, largely through trade, with many of the key aspects of modern capitalism being invented in Amsterdam; however, given the country’s geography, investment in land was difficult — so money had to seek other routes to grow. Tulips were one such speculative investment; they became status symbols for the newly rich merchant and financier class, which stimulated both a rise in prices and efforts to breed ever more exquisite blooms….

“The most sought-after bulbs were those infected with the tulip breaking potyvirus, which caused elaborate streaking in the petals. As far as the breeder was concerned, a tulip was only as good as its infection, which (since there was no understanding of either genetics or viruses) had to be left entirely to chance.”

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Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring photos of tulips I took a few weeks ago; the first post is Some Time with Red Tulips (1 of 2). A few of these streaked varieties appeared in that first post; this one shows some with peppermint stripes and those with large streaks of yellow and orange. And today we learned that the presence of these streaks is not just a flower variation: the streaks are caused by tulip breaking virus — and tulips are only one of two plant genuses (the other is lilies) where potyvirus causes color variations in the flower petals. Who knew?!?

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s May Day poem is an elaborate meditation on seasonal transitions, especially that of the advent of spring, the emergence of bird-song, and the resurgence of new plants and flowers. I excerpted a very short portion — a section that led up to the (appropriate to my photoshoot) appearance of tulips in morning light — but the poem is much, much longer. If you’d like to take a look at the rest, here’s a link to the whole thing: May-Day by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Happy May Day! And thanks for taking a look!

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From “Too Many Tulips” by Joseph Addison in The Tatler, No. 218 (1710), quoted in The Gardener’s World by Joseph Wood Krutch:

“[As] they were passing by me into the garden, I asked them to let me be one of their company.

“The Gentleman of the house told me, if I delighted in flowers, it would be worth my while; for that he believed he could shew me such a blow of tulips, as was not to be matched in the whole country….

“I was very much pleased and astonished at the glorious show of these gay vegetables, that arose in great profusion on all the banks about us….

“Sometimes I considered them with the eye of an ordinary spectator, as so many beautiful objects varnished over with a natural gloss, and stained with such a variety of colours, as are not to be equalled in any artificial dyes or tinctures….

“Sometimes I considered every leaf as an elaborate piece of tissue, in which the threads and fibres were woven together into different configurations, which gave a different colouring to the light as it glanced on the several parts of the surface….

“Sometimes I considered the whole bed of tulips… as a multitude of optic instruments, designed for the separating light into all those various colours of which it is composed.”

From “The Doorway” by Louise Gluck in Poems 1962-2012:

I wanted to stay as I was,
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past —

not midsummer, the intoxicant,
but late spring, the grass not yet high
at the edge of the garden, the early tulips
beginning to open….

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Hello!

Sometimes I find a quotation that so accurately captures the experience of seeing and photographing a batch of flowers, that little else needs to be said. The first quotation above — originally published in a British journal called The Tatler in 1710 — could have been written about these red and multicolored tulips I found growing in the partial shade of some large oak, maple, and dogwood trees at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens a couple of weeks ago. On a bright spring morning, the sun created a lot of reflected light from all directions, producing the kind of backlighting and side-lighting that I like to work with, while still letting me preserve accurate color and detail in wide-angle shots.

Thanks for taking a look!

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