The Tulip: The Story of the Flower That Has Made Men Mad

Pavord's passion for the flower is evident from the opening pages of the book, where she tells of scrambling across the hillsides of Crete in search of an obscure, indigenous purple tulip. The story of the discovery of this tulip leads into Pavord's extraordinary history of this beautiful, enigmatic flower. As with all the best love stories, Pavord's is told from the perspective of the object of affection--in this case, the tulip--from its adoption by the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul in the 18th century to its present cultivation by the Wakefield Tulip Society.

Along the way, incredible stories of people's investments in the flower emerge, the result, as Pavord explains, of a unique feature of the tulip. Its variegated colors are produced by a small parasitic aphid, which weakens the plant but produces its gorgeous hues. The tulipomania that gripped 17th-century Europe was a form of futures trading, as people purchased tulip bulbs at increasingly inflated prices with the hope that they would flower into the most beautiful and kaleidoscopic colors imaginable. Tulip is an extraordinary book, beautifully illustrated and offering a fascinating story of our obsession with the most ephemeral of objects. Buying tulip bulbs will never be the same again. --Jerry Brotton

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Not an easy read, 2008-03-05
I found this book frustrating to read...it is a collection of interesting historical anecdotes strung together like an assembly of mis-sorted beads. Each one of them might stand alone as an essay but the author seems to be lacking the craft or will to force them together into an entertaining narrative.

My experience trying to read this was like being dragged to the opera--at first I was seduced by the pageantry and vivid colors, but eventually I grew bored and wished it would end. Read one chapter of this book and you may like it, but it takes real will and focus to make it to the end.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Awful, 2007-08-13
I read this book for a non-fiction book club. It was selected based on reviews. This was quite simply the most boring book I have ever tried to read. As stated by others, there was absolutely no story line. It should be listed as a horticulture book so that those of us looking for a story line are not dupped into paying $15 for a book that in my opinion never should have been published.


8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

Science, History, Culture, and Mania. Buy It!, 2005-10-28
`The Tulip' by Anna Pavord is a much different sort of book than the now famous `The Orchid Thief' written by `New Yorker' writer Susan Orlean and the basis of the movie starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper.

Ms. Pavord is a much more conventional writer on things horticultural, although this is certainly not a conventional horticultural book. The subtitle, `The Story of A Flower That Has Made Men Mad' begins to give a sense of the historical importance of the tulip which began as a wild flower native ranging from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to Persia (modern Iran) and domesticated under the Ottoman sultans who ruled this part of the world in the mid-15th century.

The tulip mania reached heights which are hard to believe today and I'm hard pressed to think of anything comparable in the modern world unless it is the income of professional sportsmen such as Tiger Woods and Andre Agassi who receive astronomical compensations for lending their names to commercial products purely on the basis of a skill at something which for almost everyone else on the planet is a recreation.

I make this comparison because as a tulip grower myself, I find this simply nothing more than a decoration, no more nor less valuable than our dahlias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. This book makes clear the fact that from 1560 to 1750, the tulip became much, much more than a pretty decoration for spring gardens and dining room floral arrangements.

One thing I can appreciate is the novelty of this lovely flower to the rather dour shores of France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia in the 16th century. Not only was this flower colorful, even before modern breeders got a hold of it and created an almost endless series of hybrids, but it had an almost magical property of having unusually colored mutants arise from bulbs of monochrome flowers. Ordinary tulip bulbs became unusually pricy in this 200 year period; however, these `sport' bulbs which did not carry over to seeds given off by these plants were sold for astronomical prices, sometimes even as high as the price of a house of the time (in the late 19th century, the cause of this mutation was discovered to be caused by a virus).

While the author does not offer a lot of theorizing on the subject, it seems that Europe was as interested in decorative plants acquired in this age of Exploration as they were with the new foodstuffs coming from the new world. And, while the Dutch were adept horticulturists, so that they had the skills to grow the tulip as well or better than the French or the English, they were also the leading mercantile power in Europe and Asia (leaving the New World to the Spanish) in this period. This means they had the means to bring back to Holland a wide variety of tulips and other bulb flowers.

After the tulip's financial bubble burst, it's popularity was sustained by countless garden clubs in northern Europe, especially in England, leading to the explosion we see today in tulip hybridization surpassed, I suspect by only the business in rose hybrids.

As histories of science and technology go, this may not be quite as thrilling as the history of quantum physics or astrophysics or even mathematics, but it is a great tale of where the intersection of novelty and human folly can take us.



10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

Interesting,but heavy., 2002-05-12
Ms.Pavord certainly does love her tulips - the narrative is strewn with latin names for every variety of tulip.
Originally from the middle-east and very different to most other flowers, the discovery of strange multi-coloured hybrids that appeared spontaneously kept nurserymen occupied for years looking for the perfect specimen. This led to an outrageous inflation in the price, people selling their homes to buy one bulb!

Written in a style that fails to hold one's attention, there is perhaps a tad more botanical detail than is necessary for the layman, but when one considers that this is the second book - a corollary to a scholarly exercise - on tulips, it is surprising that so little jargon is used.
Very informative though lacking in story-telling. ***.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

the topic seemed so interesting..., 2001-12-21
I could not finish this book, and I thought it would be right up my alley. It was a sort of a mix of anecdotes and history. Personally I could have done without the anecdotes.

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