Historic Tulips

This article was featured in the April 2025 Bartram’s Garden collaboration with the Southwest Globe Times newspaper.

Few flowers evoke the feeling that spring has truly sprung as much as the tulip. A favorite of Easter bouquets, these beautiful cup-shaped flowers come in seemingly every color and make appearances in gardens all over the world in large swaths when the weather finally breaks between the months of March and May. Their singular bloom is brief, however, and they become dormant in the summer once the flowers and leaves die back to an underground storage bulb, and they aren’t seen again until the following spring. While they are usually associated with the Netherlands, tulips were originally found in mountainous regions in a band stretching from Southern Europe to Central Asia. They thrive in temperate climates (zone 7 or colder), and prefer long, cool springs and dry summers.

Human cultivation of the tulip has a long and interesting history. Tulips arrived in Europe from Turkey in the mid-1500s and exploded in popularity during the Dutch Tulip Mania, or “Tulipomania,” of the 1630s. Contract prices for some bulbs of the exotic and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, sometimes even exceeding the cost of a house. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is considered to be the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history.

Of particular interest during Tulipomania were so-called “broken tulips.” Tulip breaking virus (TBV) is a potyvirus that infects the bulb and causes the cultivar to “break” its color, resulting in intricate patterns of featherings or flame-like effects of different colors on the petals. The condition was first discovered in 1576 by Carolus Clusius, famed botanist and father of the Dutch tulip industry. At the time, no one understood what caused the breaks, and finding a broken tulip in one’s own collection was simply a matter of luck, although breeders and collectors performed all kinds of experiments to try and get their tulips to break. Once it was discovered that it was a virus that caused the condition, broken tulips fell out of fashion. However, as a historic garden, we at Bartram’s Garden can still appreciate the broken tulip’s beauty and historic significance.

Dutch settlers brought tulips to America in the late 1600s, but since they did not have nutritional or medicinal value, they were generally limited to the wealthy as a status symbol. Botanist John Bartram was among the earlier cultivators of tulips in the United States. The earliest records of tulips at Bartram’s Garden date back to 1735, when English merchant Peter Collinson sent a box of various bulbs including a “variety of offsets of Tulips.” In 1738, Collinson sent Bartram “a few Double Tulips… & some offsets of best breeding Tulips which are Endowed with a wonderfull faculty to Diversifie into Variety of Colours.” Many tulip varieties later appear in records and plant catalogues throughout the Bartram family’s tenure.

In 2003, the Formal Flower Gardener at Bartram’s Garden removed all the tulips that had been in the common flower garden to start over with documented varieties, including several broken varieties that are truly stunning to see in person. In the twenty years since, the once-diverse historic tulip collection has dwindled, likely due to animals digging them up, bulbs naturally losing vigor over time, and improper storage practice. In 2023, we experienced a severe mealybug infestation in storage and lost a significant number of bulbs as a result. We cleaned and treated the remaining bulbs that still seemed viable with neem oil, then planted them in our trial beds in Fall 2023 to see if they would come up in the spring. Luckily, many did, and we took the opportunity to take inventory and meticulously label each one.

Last year, Bartram’s Garden received a $1,000 grant from the Hardy Plant Society, and we were able to purchase 94 new tulip bulbs from Old House Gardens, our primary source for historic bulbs. Some of these will replenish existing collections which suffered severe loss from the mealybugs, while others are varieties that we haven’t had at Bartram’s Garden in several years, including the Absalon, Black & White, Lord Stanley, Duc van Tol violet, Lac van Rijn, and Keizerskroon varieties. (The Lord Stanley and Royal Sovereign types are so rare that we were limited to 1 bulb each in our purchase!)

In order to preserve our investment going forward, we plan to lift the bulbs from the display beds each summer when they die back, and store them in a cool, dry space, where they will be checked on periodically for pests until they can be replanted in the fall. We also plan to keep an annual inventory to make sure all our bulbs are accounted for and don’t get lost in the ground. We hope to increase our numbers naturally over time by separating offsets, small bulblets that typically grow in clusters of two per healthy bulb.

The Horticulture team planted our new tulip bulbs last fall in the center display beds of the Carr and Common Flower Gardens, and we estimate that most of them will be in full bloom just in time for Bartram’s Garden’s annual Spring Fest on April 19!

Formal Flower Gardener Emily Costantino will be leading a tulip tour during the festival to celebrate the receipt of the grant from the Hardy Plant Society, as well as to inform attendees of the fascinating history of these beautiful flowers. Be sure to come out and see them for yourself!