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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Tulips

               A sure sign of spring in my back yard is the blooming of clumps of Tulipa tarda – a variety of perennial, low growing, spreading, and very easy to grow.  Unfortunately they only come in yellow, but I like them anyway, never having had much luck with the more common showy tulips that we associate with Holland and Ottawa.  Tulipa tarda are hardy enough to over winter every year.
                Tulips actually originated in Central Asia, with 50 or so varieties growing wild.  The Turks cultivated them as early as 1000 AD (or CE if you prefer).  In one story, in the mid 1500s the Turkish Ambassador to Austria brought some bulbs to Vienna and they spread from there.  Another version says that a biologist from Vienna was given some bulbs by his friend, the Ambassador to Constantinople.  The latter had seen them growing in gardens.  At any rate, by the 1630s tulips had become all the rage, a status symbol and a coveted luxury item in Holland and other parts of Europe, with some rare single bulbs selling for thousands of dollars each.   Prices kept rising, people mortgaged whatever they could to raise cash, and speculation in bulbs continued, with a futures market.  Eventually the demand ended and markets crashed.  There is a book called Tulipomania by Mike Dash about this whole thing – I haven`t read it yet, but it sounds interesting.
                The Ottawa tulip festival (which I`ve never attended, though I`ve seen some of the tulips) began after Princess Juliana of the Netherlands gave 100,000 bulbs in the fall of 1945, in appreciation of the safe haven she and her two daughters had in Canada at Government House during the second world war, as well as for Canada`s role in liberating the Netherlands.  Her third daughter was born in Canada during this time (the only royal baby ever born in North America).  The room at the Ottawa Civic Hospital where the baby was born was temporarily ceded to the Netherlands so that she could be a Dutch citizen.  The first Tulip Festival was held in Ottawa in 1953, at the suggestion of world famous photographer Malak Karsh (who took lots of photos), and organized by the Ottawa Board of Trade.  It now lasts for 18 days with some 3 million tulips on display in the region (that`s a lot of planting).
                Despite their not being very showy, I`m happy to be able to enjoy my little yellow tulips without having to have sold my house to get them!

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