Purchasing his first tulip

n 1637, a Dutch farmer found a florist that had a specific variety of tulip that he preferred, the farmer negotiated with the seller and the farmer purchased his tulip bulb. The price was reasonable for a single Viceroy variety tulip bulb. It included "two loads of wheat, four loads of rye, four oxen, eight pigs, a dozen sheep, and two heads of wine, four tons of butter, over a thousand pounds of cheese, a bed, some clothing and a silver mug. A high price for a tulip was not abnormal. During tulip mania in the seventeenth century, a Semper Augustus, even more valued than the Viceroy tulip, would bring around 6,000 guilders. Tulip prices and the tulip gossip became so extreme that in 1637 Holland passed a law stopping such extremes.

Tulips are still linked to the Netherlands but, the tulip is not a Dutch flower. Tulips came to the Netherlands from a different part of the world. The tulip was seen in Turkey first. The ambassador sent by the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire saw the flowers growing in the gardens of Adrianople and Constantinople. The Turks had been cultivating tulips as early as AD 1000. Most of these tulips originated in areas around the Black Sea, in the Crimea, and in the steppes to the north of the Caucasus.

Luckily the price for tulips have come down considerably so that anyone can now enjoy this precious bloom.