Customer Reviews

The Tulip

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

What a big disappointment this book was!! I love gardens, love gardening, and majored in history, so I thought a history of the tulip would be a great buy, but boy does Anna Pavord overdo what could have been a good thing. This book is at least 50% too expensive and 50% too long, and it would have been so much better if the author had forgotten about trying to be comprehensive (the second half of the book is nothing but a huge catalog of species of interest only to professional horticulturists) and put more effort into making some of the fasxinating people she mentions in the first half come alive. Instead, the book turns into an over-rapid tour through hundreds of years of history, with little or no attempt made to provide background details that would help us put an undoubtedly fascinating story in context. The interesting parts of the tulip's history - particularly the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s - are given little more weight than lengthy trawls through far less fascinating periods. Sure, the book looks great but, really, what a shame.

`The Tulip' by Anna Pavord is a much different sort of book than the now famous `The Orchid Thief' written by `New Yorker' writer Susan Orlean and the basis of the movie starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper.

Ms. Pavord is a much more conventional writer on things horticultural, although this is certainly not a conventional horticultural book. The subtitle, `The Story of A Flower That Has Made Men Mad' begins to give a sense of the historical importance of the tulip which began as a wild flower native ranging from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to Persia (modern Iran) and domesticated under the Ottoman sultans who ruled this part of the world in the mid-15th century.

The tulip mania reached heights which are hard to believe today and I'm hard pressed to think of anything comparable in the modern world unless it is the income of professional sportsmen such as Tiger Woods and Andre Agassi who receive astronomical compensations for lending their names to commercial products purely on the basis of a skill at something which for almost everyone else on the planet is a recreation.

I make this comparison because as a tulip grower myself, I find this simply nothing more than a decoration, no more nor less valuable than our dahlias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. This book makes clear the fact that from 1560 to 1750, the tulip became much, much more than a pretty decoration for spring gardens and dining room floral arrangements.

One thing I can appreciate is the novelty of this lovely flower to the rather dour shores of France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia in the 16th century. Not only was this flower colorful, even before modern breeders got a hold of it and created an almost endless series of hybrids, but it had an almost magical property of having unusually colored mutants arise from bulbs of monochrome flowers. Ordinary tulip bulbs became unusually pricy in this 200 year period; however, these `sport' bulbs which did not carry over to seeds given off by these plants were sold for astronomical prices, sometimes even as high as the price of a house of the time (in the late 19th century, the cause of this mutation was discovered to be caused by a virus).

While the author does not offer a lot of theorizing on the subject, it seems that Europe was as interested in decorative plants acquired in this age of Exploration as they were with the new foodstuffs coming from the new world. And, while the Dutch were adept horticulturists, so that they had the skills to grow the tulip as well or better than the French or the English, they were also the leading mercantile power in Europe and Asia (leaving the New World to the Spanish) in this period. This means they had the means to bring back to Holland a wide variety of tulips and other bulb flowers.

After the tulip's financial bubble burst, it's popularity was sustained by countless garden clubs in northern Europe, especially in England, leading to the explosion we see today in tulip hybridization surpassed, I suspect by only the business in rose hybrids.

As histories of science and technology go, this may not be quite as thrilling as the history of quantum physics or astrophysics or even mathematics, but it is a great tale of where the intersection of novelty and human folly can take us.

This is a beautiful book and more of a history book than a garden book. I found it in the history section of a local bookstore. "The Tulip" is filled with color reproductions of paintings and prints executed in the Netherlands in the 16th-18th centuries, so one could argue it is an art book.

Although the author tells the story of the introduction of the tulip into the west, the real contribution of the book as far as I am concerned is the author's discourse on the origins of the various kinds of tulips.

Reading, "The Tulip" has relieved me of the feelings of intimidation I have experienced as I browsed through the various professional bulb catalogs from growers. These catalogs have quite reasonable prices, and many more bulb offerings than can be found in local garden center stores, however, they never contain photos and provide only sparse information about the growing requirements and behaviour of specific bulbs. Knowing more about the geographic origins, history, and growing preferences of various tulip types has made me bolder, and I am experimenting with many new bulbs this year.

If you're new to gardening, you may not find this book very useful. Try the Eyewitness Garden Handbook "Bulbs" to get started growing bulbs, including tulips.

This book is lovely and I'm glad I own it. However, I'm quite disappointed because it does not live up to the rave reviews from the press. Ms. Pavlord doesn't do much more than chronicle the hundreds of people who have owned, grown, or collected, admired tulips over the last few thousand years. The whole book reads as a very boring list. There is no sense of larger themes linked to human history, commerce or science. I had hoped to become quite involved and inspired by this book -- because I love tulips -- but that has not been the case. Alas, I've made it to page 100 but now I am giving up and it will take a spot on my coffee table.

Ms.Pavord certainly does love her tulips - the narrative is strewn with latin names for every variety of tulip.
Originally from the middle-east and very different to most other flowers, the discovery of strange multi-coloured hybrids that appeared spontaneously kept nurserymen occupied for years looking for the perfect specimen. This led to an outrageous inflation in the price, people selling their homes to buy one bulb!

Written in a style that fails to hold one's attention, there is perhaps a tad more botanical detail than is necessary for the layman, but when one considers that this is the second book - a corollary to a scholarly exercise - on tulips, it is surprising that so little jargon is used.
Very informative though lacking in story-telling. ***.

This book, generally touted as 'the definitive book' on tulips, is somewhat disappointing. More interesting historical information exists on tulipomania and tulip fever. Particularly irksome is the prevalence of passages in French with no English translations. Come on, Ms Pavord, we aren't all academics schooled in French! I thought information on the discovery of the virus that causes tulips to 'break' should have been included: so much has been written already about tulip fever through the 16th and 17th centuries that to continue the history to the 1920s, when the cause of breaking tulips was discovered, would have rounded out the picture nicely. But we only receive a vague reference here and there. Considering also that the latter part of the book concerns species and hybrid tulips, more photographs would have been helpful. One description sounds much like another after a while.

The packaging of this volume is simply beautiful as are the lavish illustrations. However,the book which promises a facinating tale is in truth quite dull. Anna Pavord is simply too carried away with the botanty of her subject and gives just a glimpse into the human maelstrom that surrounded the tulip. More story telling and 'human interest' anecdotes would have been appreciated.

Sadly, there is a real trend in this country for reviewers to fall for a PR's hype and laud a book that just isn't anywhere near as good as the author and the publisher would like us to believe. The Tulip is a prime example of this phenomenon. I must have read four or five reviews of the book before I bought it, and they were all gushing in their praise for The Tulip and for Anna Pavord. Sadly, neither is remotely worth it. This volume is over-written, over-priced and over-long. Do yourself a favour. Don't fall for the hype and don't waste your money on the Tulip.

Sorry, but I have to agree with some of the negative comments this book has already attracted. Anna Pavord has no sense of proportion. A book which placed the tulip in the context of its times would be fabulous. This is just too narrow and too much.

If you're looking for some insight into the 1600's tulip craze before making a trip to the Netherlands, this is NOT the book to buy. Try "Tulipomania" by Mike Dash instead. His version is way more entertaining and easy to understand. I know Anna Pavord's book is well-regarded, but for amateur gardeners and people who are mainly interested in discovering WHY the bulb frenzy occurred, her phone-book size tome is way over the top w/information. I found it plodding and skimmed many pages only to find that she hadn't answered the key question of how the craze developed. Skip this mega-volume and try the other unless you're a serious horticulturalist.