Spring Time Beauties

by Kay Novy

Title

Spring Time Beauties

Artist

Kay Novy

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Tulip is the common name for any member of the thousands of varieties and about 100 species of bulbous plants comprising the genus Tulipa of the flowering plant family Liliaceae. The term also is used in reference to the flowers of any of these plants, which tend to be colorful and often bell-shaped. With the showy flowers coming in such colors as white, red, brown, yellow, and deep purple, tulips are highly popular as ornamental plants for gardens, potted plants, and as cut flowers.
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While the flowers advance the tulip species' individual purpose of reproduction, they provide a value for human beings in terms of their prized aesthetic beauty. In the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, the enthusiasm for tulips lead to a period of speculation, known as "tulipomania," where the demand for particular varieties commanded enormous prices.
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Tulips can be grown in either of two ways: through offsets or seed. Being genetic clones of the parent plant, offsets are the only way to enlarge the stock of a given tulip cultivar. By contrast, tulips do not come true from seed; the mixing of genes between parent tulips is very unpredictable. A tulip grown from seed will usually bear only a passing resemblance to the flower from which the seeds were taken. This makes for great potential in breeding new tulip flowers, and great variation in the wild. However, tulip growers must be patient: offsets often take at least a year to grow to sufficient size to flower, and a tulip grown from seed will not flower for anywhere between five and seven years after planting. "Broken" tulips (tulips affected by the mosaic virus) will occasionally revert to plain "breeder" coloring, but usually maintain their colorful, infected state when grown from offsets.

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March 14th, 2013

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