Last fall when the Heritage Garden Club President had asked members to plant red tulips to honor our servicemen and women Mary Alice planted 100 red tulip bulbs. These tulips are now beginning to push up through the mulch. One morning last week I went out in the back yard and happened to notice that the deer had found and feasted on tender young tulip plants.
Two years ago when the deer were eating the young tulips, she placed wire over the tulip beds and sprayed a very smelly liquid that was supposed to deter the deer. The wire seemed to work; however, the bad smelling spray had to be reapplied after every rain.
The tulip was supposedly introduced into Europe in the sixteenth century by Ogier de Busbecg sent by Austrian Emperor Ferdinand 1. The tulip is generally thought to be the Latinized name of the Arabic word turban.
After being introduced, the tulip became very popular and because of its high price, tulips were even stolen from the emperor’s garden. In March of 1637, at the peak of tulip mania, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. During the Dutch Golden Age, contract prices for the recently introduced tulip bulbs reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.
The tulip, which is one of the world’s most easily recognized and beloved flowers, is a comfortable flower choice for a gift. They are not too elegant, too romantic, too big or too small. The tulip is always just right.
The meaning of tulip is generally perfect love. Just as many flowers, tulips of different colors often carry their own significance. Red tulips are most strongly associated with true love; while purple tulips symbolize royalty; yellow tulips have evolved somewhat, from once representing hopeless love to now being a common expression for cheerful thoughts and sunshine; white tulips are either used to claim worthiness or to send a message of forgiveness and variegated tulips, once among the most popular varieties due to their striking color patterns, represent beautiful eyes.
Tulips belong to the same family as lilies, a relative of the onion. The word tulip is descended from a Persian word that led to the Turkish word tulbent (a turban, like a hat),which led to the Latin word tulipa.
There are 75 wild tulip species and over 3,000 varieties of tulips, with the red varieties being the most popular. However, the most famous tulip is said to be the “Queen of the Night”, which appears as almost black, however, it is a very deep purple.
Although tulip bulbs are known to be poisonous, at least part of the tulips are edible. The petals are said to have either a mild bean taste; a lettuce taste or no taste at all. One must be careful not to eat tulips that have been treated with chemicals. During WWII, a time when food was scarce, the people living in the Netherlands made bread from tulips. A Dutch man, who grew up on a tulip farm during the war, made the comment that the bread made from tulips tasted like wet sawdust and
did taste good.
The tulip flower is shaped as a cup and consists of three petals and three sepals. Since petals and sepals appear the same, they are both known under the common name "tepals".
Tulips are monocots,which produce one large, bell-shaped bloom at the end of each stem. Tulip bulbs should be planted in the fall. Food stored in the tulip bulb allows the bulb to remain alive underground, and as winter approaches, the remainder of the plant dies.
If Mary Alice loses as many tulips this year as she did two years ago, I think her bulb garden in the future will include only daffodils, which the deer do not bother.