A virus painted the streaked tulips that drove Dutch buyers wild
The feathered, flame-streaked tulips that fetched fortunes during the Dutch tulip mania of 1634 to 1637 owed their beauty to disease. An aphid-borne mosaic virus suppressed one pigment and let the pale base colour show through in streaks, while quietly weakening the bulbs that collectors prized.
Tulip colour comes from two layers working together: a base of yellow or white, plus an anthocyanin pigment laid over it. When the tulip breaking virus blocks the anthocyanin, the underlying base appears as flames and feathers. Growers during the mania tried everything to trigger breaks, from alchemists' tricks to sprinkling paint powder or pigeon droppings on the roots. Infected plants produced fewer offsets and had to be destroyed even if they reverted. The virus is now nearly gone from fields, and the modern Rembrandt group, named because the painter depicted admired breaks, gets its patterns from breeding instead.
Wild tulips grow along a band near 40 degrees north, from southeastern Europe and Turkey through the Levant and the Caspian region to the Pamir-Alai and Tien Shan ranges of Central Asia, their centre of diversity. They favour steppe and mountain country with long cool springs and dry summers, dying back to a bulb after flowering. Persians were cultivating them by the tenth century, and by the fifteenth they had become a treasured emblem of the Ottomans.
Northern Europe learned of them in the sixteenth century through diplomats at the Ottoman court. The word itself probably traces through Ottoman Turkish for muslin back to a Persian word for turban, perhaps through a translator's mix-up at a time when Ottomans wore tulips on their turbans. Linnaeus published the genus in 1753; it now holds about 75 species in four subgenera.
Pure blue has never appeared, and most tulips have no scent. A true black eluded breeders until 1986, when a grower in Bovenkarspel crossed the dark Queen of the Night with Wienerwald. Compounds in the plant cause skin reactions in bulb sorters and florists and are toxic to cats, dogs and horses.
Source: Tulip
