Lamber's Facts about tulips

What every Tulip lover should know

There is no other flower I know of that has a special place in the hearts of so many people that I have met over the years.

There are over 150 species of tulips with 3,000 different varieties.

• Their flower buds are known for being almost perfectly symmetrical. In the fashion industry for years the most “beautiful” models were chosen on how perfectly the symmetry of their face was.

• Most Tulips sprout a single flower bud, but a few varieties have up to four blooms on a single stem.

• Tulips are part of the Lily family. Who also grow from bulbs. "Tulips (Tulipa) are a genus of spring-blooming perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes (having bulbs as storage organs). Tulips Liliacae"

• Tulips only bloom for 3-7  days in the spring.

• Tulips can be found in almost any colour Originally most tulips appeared in warm colours; Red - Orange - Yellow -Pinks. More new colours appear trough cultivating new Tulips.

• Different colour tulips have different meaning when they are given as a gift. The red flowers symbolize true love,  this is why they are so popular around Valentines Day while purple represents loyalty.

 Made a mistake? White tulips mean “I’m sorry”

• Tulips are also said to signal the arrival of Spring. A sign of new beginning and hope.

• Tulips are native to Central Asia but did not really become popular until reaching the Netherlands. In the 16th century, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of the Habsburg monarchy to the Ottoman Empire. While visiting Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificant, a fan of tulips, he was given some bulbs to take back to Vienna.

• De Busbecq then passed the tulip bulbs on to his friend, Flemish botanist Charles de l'Écluse, the prefect to the emperor's garden in Vienna. When d'Écluse left Vienna to teach at a university in Leiden, Netherlands, he brought the bulbs along and planted them there. It was there that the Dutch monks cultivated the first Tulips in Holland.

• The Parkinson’s Disease Foundation uses a tulip as it’s symbol. 

• The red tulip has been associated with Parkinson's awareness since 1980 when a Dutch horticulturist with PD developed a red and white tulip.

• Tulips were once the most expensive flower…. … And in the 1600s, they were even said to cost 10 times more than a average working man’s average salary in the Netherlands, making them more valuable than some homes. In 17th- century Amsterdam, a tulip bulb was worth more than a diamond.

• The time period where the tulip was so expensive (around 1634 to 1637) in known as “Tulip Mania”

• Tulip petals are edible and can be used in place of onions in many recipes. The tradition of eating tulip bulbs and petals was born out of Dutch pragmatism during times of famine in the last year of World War II. During December of 1944-45, a freezing winter fell over the Netherlands that would last multiple months. 

• The Netherlands is the world’s largest commercial producer of tulips, with around three billion exported each year. 

• Tulips are the only flower that continue to grow in the vase for at least another inch. This is one of my favourite features of Tulips,

• The best time to plant tulip bulbs is in the autumn up to December so that the roots can establish themselves before it gets to cold. However if the ground is not frozen and you have tulip bulbs you can still plant these as late as February.

• Tulips will bend and twist to grow towards the light ( even in a vase!) I call this the dancing of tulips.

• The tulipiere, literally translated from French as tulip holder, is a Dutch vase made of hand-crafted pottery, usually white-blue delftware, since historically produced in the city of Delf. The design of the vase typically presents several spouts protruding from a central base, which serves as a water reservoir. There are some amazing examples on show in the Rijksmuseum, The Dutch national museum dedicated to arts and history in Amsterdam.

• Every year in January, Amsterdam celebrates National Tulip Day, where the public can pick there own tulips to bring home from a tulip garden planted on the Dam in central Amsterdam.