15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Badly over-hyped - only for true obsessives, May 13, 1999
By A Customer
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.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Science, History, Culture, and Mania. Buy It!, October 28, 2005
`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.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A relatively scientific tome..., May 19, 2000
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.
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