The tulip has over time become an icon of Dutch culture, society and landscape. Rarely has the identity of a people been so closely bound to a flower. Any tourist to the Netherlands should have visiting the tulip fields high on their list of things to do while visiting the Netherlands. It is truely a spectacular show of Dutch culture and landscape.
As a tourist you´ll have two good options to go and see the tulips in the Netherlands. The first is going to the fields where they are grown commercially. The town Lisse in the west of the Netherlands is very much the focal point of the tulip fields. Surrounding Lisse are numerous fields where tulips are grown on a truely monumental scale. The best way to get around to see the tulip fields around Lisse is by car. See our page on getting around the Netherlands by car for more information.
The second option is to visit the Keukenhof, which is also located close to Lisse. Rather than visiting the tulip farms, you´ll get the chance to visit a park dedicated to tulips. While you won´t get to see tulips as far as the eye can see, you will get to see what the Dutch can do with the tulip in a garden setting, albeit a massive garden setting. Remember that the only time of the year that you can truely see the explosion of color from the tulips is from the middle of March to the middle of May - the Keukenhof itself is actually closed outside of peak flowering season, see our Keukenhof page for further information.
The tulip was originally a wild flower that grew in Central Asia. The Turks were the first to cultivate it as early as 1000AD. The tulip was only introduced to Western Europe - including the Netherlands - in the 17th century by a famous biologist, Carolus Clusius. In the 1590s he became the director of the Hortus Botanicus, the oldest botanical garden of Europe, in Leiden. While in this function, he received some bulbs from Ogier de Busbecq, his friend and the Ambassador to Constantinople (modern day Istanbul). Ogier had seen the flower called the tulip - after the Turkish word for turban - growing in the palace gardens and sent a few to Clusius. He planted them in his garden in Leiden so began the rise of the tulip in Europe.
In the beginning of the 17th century, the tulip started to be used as a garden decoration. As a result it gained immense popularity as a commodity, especially in Holland. Interest in the flower became huge and the price of bulbs attracted a price to match the interest. Botanists began to grow hybrids of the tulip and quickly found ways to grow extremely decorative tulips. These decorative hybrids rapidly became social status symbols - from 1636 to 1637 Tulipmania erupted in Holland. Tulip bulbs were being sold at unbelievablely high prices and the value continued to rise. More and more people bought in to the tulip bulb trade in an attempt to ride the wave - further forcing up the prices.
This bubble in tulip trade eventually reached such a massive size that it became inevitable that it would bust. In a very short amount of time the supply of tulip bulbs managed to catch up to demand. Suddenly a relatively small amount of tulip bulbs offered for sale failed to sell and panic gripped the trade. Many people had invested massive amounts of their equity in to the trade and quickly tried to exit the market to recover their money. This mass turn around of buyers in to sellers destroyed the tulip market and caused the Tulip Crash.
It was only in the 20th century that it was discovered that the frilly petals of the most decorative and most expensive tulips were actually the symptoms of an infection caused by the mosaic virus. Diseased tulips are no longer traded. The same looks have been achieved with modern hybridizing techniques and the tulips are healthy.
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