History:
Tulips along with windmills and wooden shoes will forever be symbols of the Dutch. Originally, however, tulips were not native to Holland. They were imported from Turkey, but originally tulips came from Central Asia, which used to be under Turkish rule. A man by the name of Carolus Clusius, a Austrian court botanist in Vienna, grew tulip varieties and spread them around to fellow botanists in Europe. He is thought to be responsible for the spread of tulips as an cultivated garden plant throughout Europe.
Soon, books began to be written about the tulip and the number of varieties available grew by leaps and bounds. Books, with watercolors of different tulip varieties depicted became that time's way of cataloging or "window shopping" for tulips. These books were professionally done by artists and usually were leatherbound. Customers began to pay large sums of money in the 1630's which explained why sellers were able to invest large amounts of money in their "catalogs."
These new tulips sold for large amounts of money were termed "broken," or could be descibed as a flamed pattern. We now know that this was the cause of a virus and that broken tulips after some years are totally sick and will not have the same interesting patterns. Prices spiraled to ridiculous amounts for bulbs that neither the buyer or seller would see until delivery. Things were so out of hand that bulb growers asked the government to ban the trade.
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