A Love Letter to Tulips

April 17, 2026

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

'Tulips', Sylvia Plath (1932–63)

The tulip is, to me, the most human of all the cut flowers. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips,” these flowers have become the enemy. In this extract the very qualities about it that we love have become threatening to Plath in her fragile mental state and heightened awareness. The tulips seem to be watching her, stealing the air she breathes. Tulips are unruly. They not only continue to grow in the vase long after they have been cut, but they also react to temperature and light. How many times have you left your tulips standing up like soldiers, to come down the next morning and find them wide open, sprawled across the table, hanging out of the vase, looking, for all the world, as if they have had a night out on the tiles? Cut them again and refresh the water with an ice cube and a few hours later they will be standing straight again, looking only a little the worse for wear from the exuberances of the night before.

A fellow florist, Flora Starkey, made an enchanting timelapse video of tulips. She arranged them in vases and left them to get on with just being tulips. In the film we can see the tulips literally dancing, but what struck me most was that they weren’t all moving in the same direction. Each flower seemed to have a life of its own, twisting and turning, bowing and straightening up. It’s one of the most joyous and beautiful things I have ever seen.

A still from the film 'Spring Rites' by Flora Starkey

Tulips have a fascinating history, which has been the subject of many books. Here it is in brief, but if you want to know more, some recommendations include Anna Pavord’s The Tulip, Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, and Alexandre Dumas’ The Black Tulip. In 1562, an Ottoman cloth merchant sent a gift of tulip bulbs to his counterpart in Antwerp, who, imagining they were an exotic sort of onion, roasted and ate most of them. Possibly because they didn’t taste very nice, he planted the few remaining bulbs in his garden.

The following spring the first tulips grown in Europe appeared. To this day, tulips are considered to be more Dutch than clogs or round wax-covered cheeses, more Amsterdam than legal marijuana, coffee houses, or hookers in brightly lit windows. But in fact the tulip originated centuries ago in the foothills of the Tien Shen mountains on the Chinese–Russian–Afghan borders. From there they made their way, via the Silk Road, to Turkey and Persia, where they were taken up by the Ottoman Empire as a symbol of their wealth, culture, and power.

Tulips were grown in every Imperial garden. They made frequent appearances in the poetry of Rumi, Omar Khayyam, and Hafiz. Their beautiful scarlet flowers adorn iznik tiles, the brocaded robes of Sultan Suleiman, Levni miniatures, carpets, and embroidery. The first botanist to bring tulip bulbs to Europe was Carolus Clusius, possibly as a result of seeing the tulips in the garden of the hapless cloth merchant. The flower was soon taken up by the Dutch with the same enthusiasm as it had been by the Ottomans.

The ceremonial caftan of Suleiman the Magnificent being restored at the Topkapı Palace National Palaces Textile Conservation and Restoration Workshop.

The tulip came to symbolize wealth, style, and status in Holland, and people began to collect the bulbs, even resorting to stealing them from the gardens of the wealthy. Giant tulipieres were created by the great porcelain makers of Delft to show off each marvellous flower individually. Artists like Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder were commissioned to paint the tulip in exquisite artworks, featuring two of the most precious and coveted bulbs: “Semper Augustus,” white with red striation; and “Viceroy,” yellow with red flairs. The appearance of exotic tulips in the great Dutch flower paintings only added to their fame and reputation.

A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, National Gallery

Over four years during the Dutch Golden Age, between 1633 and 1637- a time that was later known as “tulipomania”-tulip bulbs became so valued that their price skyrocketed. A single tulip bulb exchanged hands for the same price as a house in the most exclusive part of Amsterdam, or six times the average person’s annual salary. Then suddenly, as fast as the bubble had blown up, it burst and the market crashed. Many people were left holding bulbs in which they had invested their entire savings, now worth no more than the single flower that would bloom and die. The tulip flower was unlikely to perform as well, if at all, the second year round. Today, tulipomania is still taught to young financiers as the first example of a market bubble and crash.

A Satire of Tulip Mania by Jan Brueghel the Younger (c. 1640)

A sad irony is that the most beautiful and desired tulips of all, the “broken” tulip, Tulipa “Semper Augustus,” with its coloured flares on a white background, is actually the result of a virus that was weakening the plant, so as it delighted the eye, the plant was dying. The “Semper Augustus” species is now extinct and, despite all the skills of botanists and breeders, nobody has ever managed to reproduce its original exquisite form. Broken tulips were highly unpredictable, often appearing in completely unexpected colours, or reverting to plain white, but when they performed it was something to behold, entrancing artists and taste-makers alike, but all the while the precious bulb was doomed.

Semper Augustus Tulip

Clusius wrote in 1585, “…any tulip thus changing its original colour is usually ruined afterwards and so wanted only to delight its master’s eyes with this variety of colours before dying, as if to bid him a last farewell.” Reading this I was struck how Clusius, like Plath, has also given the tulip an almost human status, attributing emotion and endeavour to the flower. The dancing tulip in its myriad forms and colours has held us spellbound through the centuries. It is just a flower, but it has inspired great art, poetry, and literature. It has driven people to madness and even suicide, it has made and destroyed fortunes. Today people flock to the tulip fields in April to see the vast acres striped like a Bridget Riley painting.

Belmont Nurseries, Norfolk

Many attempts have been made to press tulips, mostly resulting in mouldy messes. The tulip has a strong filament and juicy stem that are difficult to press, often rotting before they dry. However, we have had some good successes amid the many failures. Second-year tulips that have become weakened and are less fleshy often make the best pressings. Otherwise we have taken to dissecting the tulip, pressing the stem, the filament, and the stamens separately from the petals, then reconstructing them in the final piece. Sometimes we wonder, do they even want to be pressed?