Ben Zonneveld asked: "Can you give your arguments for the following statement: "The first tulips arriving in W Europe were evidently garden tulips not wild tulips" It seems to me that two sorts of evidence point to this. One is what I will call the Anna Pavord argument. Although there is much in Pavord's book on tulips with which I would quibble, her treatment of the place of the tulip in the Ottoman Empire strikes me as plausible. We'll probably never know if the plants grown in the Ottoman Empire were garden tulips or wild-collected tulips, but the popularity of tulips as garden plants in the Ottoman Empire would argue that garden strains would have arisen quickly. The tulips we see as decorative motifs on tiles and in carpets and other art ware do not in general look like wild tulips. In particular, they have long, pointed petals. One might debate the significance of this: almost certainly, some of the artists who produced such images were simply repeating stylized, traditional images and might never have seen a true tulip in bloom. And doesn't it seem likely that in a country where tulips grow wild gardeners would bring them into gardens, exchange them, and either deliberately raise them from seed or let nature take its course as the insects hybridize the heterogeneous assemblages of plants gardeners accumulate? Seeds would fall onto fertile ground, at least in the sense that they would fall in a climate to which tulips are adapted. It would be the most natural thing in the world for Turkish gardens of the time to produce hybridized tulips - hybridized by the insects or hybridized by the gardeners, but hybrids to be sure. And there is this: the bulb trade already seems to have existed within the Ottoman Empire when it began to open up to European trade. Originally the bulbs were probably marketed for human food. The first Europeans to tap into the bulb trade were simply expanding an existing market. As an aside, how many of you saw the recent article in the food section of one of the major newspapers in which a sort of rubbery ice cream had been developed based on old concoctions made with salep. Evidently the salep trade continues to this day in Turkey. The second major sort of "evidence" is the rapid diversification of the tulip in western European gardens. If western garden tulips had been derived from a single species of tulip, the probability is that this would not have occurred so rapidly. It would have taken at least two dissimilar parents contributing to the mix to get the sort of variation which seems to have characterized even the early tulips. For those of you who don't know the early history of the tulip in western Europe, keep this in mind: by the end of the sixteenth century - at most a quarter century after they had been introduced to the Netherlands - there already existed short early blooming tulips, tall late blooming tulips, and tulips intermediate to those. The diversity of varieties was already bewildering then. It isn't known for sure if the earliest tulips to be introduced to the Netherlands were in the form of seeds or bulbs. What is known is that whatever those objects were, they were shriveled and over a year old. That means that those earliest years would have been very slow going: old seed likely would not have germinated rapidly, and last year's bulbs would have gotten off to a very slow start. And if those original bits were seed, then it's likely that seven years passed before there was a first flower. The point to which I'm driving here is that tulip culture did not get off to a good start: many years probably passed before there were results, and even then it's unlikely that the whole world turned tulip crazy overnight. It is conceivable that, given the rarity of tulips and the high esteem in which they were held, that every available seed was sown and nurtured. But would twenty-five years be enough time to accommodate both this slow start and also to produce the sort of diversity which tulips quickly evidenced if the original material was a highly homozygous single species? I think that is very unlikely. The argument for origin from two species (and by species I mean plants which correspond to diploid, sexually reproducing wild populations) is hardly any more plausible. To begin with, to get a mixture of heights early low growing tulips and late tall tulips would have to be crossed. To have accomplished this quickly, those earliest tulip growers would have had to know how to save pollen from the early sorts to use on the late blooming sorts. A lot of other things would have had to happen just right to allow all of this to happen. So it seems to me possible, but hardly probable. Rather than simply speculate about what happened back then, consider what has happened in our own times. It's been nearly a century since the original crosses were made to produce the Darwin Hybrid tulips by crossing Tulipa fosteriana with the Darwin tulips. After nearly a century of work with this group, the color range is still rather restrained. The plants which have been marketed (I have no idea what the breeders might have discarded as unsuitable to their goals) are very uniform in height and size of flower. The point I'm trying to make here is that with nearly three times as much time devoted to the development of this group, the variation achieved is relatively insignificant compared to what seems to have arisen among the earliest garden tulips within only a few decades. The same seems to be true for the other hybrid groups developed in modern times: the kaufmanniana/greigii hybrids are much alike as a group, again after a full century of garden development. All of this suggests to me that the original tulips introduced into western Europe were highly heterozygous, and that points to hybrid origin either in the garden or in the wild. Now let me take this discussion of the origin of tulips in Europe in a different direction. When asked when tulips were introduced to Europe, I always equivocate a bit. The earliest tulips to arrive in Europe might have arrived as food stuff transported by ancient Mediterranean tradesmen or soldiers. At any rate, some would attribute the scattered tulip populations in otherwise improbable western European locations to this cause. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where the sun is out and the autumn crocuses are opening. My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/