Extract: Christopher Stocks on the Humble Tulip

Christopher Stocks and Angie Lewin are back with another beautiful book all about flowers. This time, they’re exploring the heroes of the British garden, unearthing their fascinating journey from distant corners of the world to the British Isles.

In the follow-up to the popular The Book of Wild Flowers, which celebrated British wild flowers and their place in the landscape, The Book of Garden Flowers is more a social history, bringing into focus some of the exotic plants introduced to our gardens over the centuries. Did you know that Charles Dickens was obsessed with a particular pelargonium (geranium) or that the first nasturtiums in the UK were planted by John Gerrard, the famous 17th-century herbalist?

Previously, we spoke to writer Christopher Stocks and painter Angie Lewin about  their approach to an unassuming yet familiar gem: the dandelion. In this extract, we hear from Christopher Stocks on the tulip, whose appearance is a sure sign that spring is on the horizon.

There are currently more than eight thousand different tulips on the internationally recognized list maintained by the Koninklijke Algemeene Vereeniging voor Bloembollencultuur (otherwise known as the Dutch Royal General Association for Bulb Culture), so there is no shortage of varieties to choose from.

But what explains their lasting popularity? After all, they’re rather simple-looking flowers compared with many others, and you wouldn’t grow many of them for their foliage alone. They rarely produce more than a single flower per bulb, and those are only briefly in bloom. Yet maybe it’s precisely their simplicity that appeals, with all the thousands of cultivars offering so many variations on a simple theme, a bit like a horticultural version of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.

I love most kinds of tulip, whether plain or parrot, lily or Rembrandt, broken or bizarre, but nothing beats seeing natural species growing in their native habitat, which often comes as a surprise when you’ve only seen them in a garden before. There are around seventy-five wild species, growing mainly in upland regions along a northern latitude of 40 degrees, from Greece and Turkey in the west to the Tian Shan mountains that straddle the borders of China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

[…]

My own favourite is T. orphanidea (previously known as T. whittallii), whose petals range between red and burnt orange, with sharply pointed tips. It’s a beautiful little tulip, found in Turkey, Crete and mainland Greece, which is where I came across it a few years ago on a visit to the northern mountains of the Peloponnese in early May. We had been driving south from Kalavrita, on the way to the spectacular source of the River Aroanios, which springs fully formed out of the ground in a beautiful forest of plane trees near the village of Planitero.

A few kilometres off the main road, however, our map showed the site of the ancient Greek temple of Artemis Hemera, so we decided to make a detour and have a look. The temple, which dates back to the ninth century BC, sits on the side of a steeply wooded hill above the remains of the ancient city of Lousoi, with views across the plain of Soudena to the mountains of Achaea.

[…]

As the narrow road looped back down to the plain, it ran between roughly ploughed fields of soil that seemed to be composed largely of stones, but as we drove we saw points of bright colour, and (not for the first time) skidded to a halt. Clambering up a bank to the level of the field, we found mostly bare earth, but bare earth
scattered with beautiful little tulips with sharply pointed flowers, scarlet outside and orange-red inside, with black blotches at their centres and six prominent stamens dusted with bright yellow pollen: Tulipa orphanidea.

They weren’t, perhaps, as attractively planted as they might have been by a gardener, but somehow it was far more thrilling to come across them by chance, thriving like weeds in their natural habitat. And now, whenever I see them in a garden, I remember how we stumbled across them at the side of the road in Greece.

Words by Christopher Stocks.

The Book of Garden Flowers is available now