The tulip is a strait-laced and unimaginative flower with a ramrod deportment and a flat, colour-saturated livery. And because it is remarkably short on personality, it is invaluable for building regimented blocks of public-park colour. The wild tulip, the forebear of these municipal beef-cakes, is an ascetic little thing, nice enough in the rock garden, but a martyr to slugs. And that's all you need to know about tulips.
Or so I thought until just last week when a bout of several rainy days found me immersed in Anna Pavord's The Tulip (Bloomsbury, £30 in UK). In fact - as she carefully chronicles in this beautiful, heavy volume - tulips are unruly, unpredictable and dreadfully covetable. In their 500-year, chequered journey from the wild species of Central Asia to the production-line Dutch hybrids of today, tulips have caused men to go demented, burghers to go bankrupt and monarchs to come unseated.
The 18th-century, tulip-mad Sultan Ahmed III of Turkey, for instance, regularly held enormously prodigal tulip festivals during the flowering season. These extravaganzas went on for days, with constant food, drink and entertainment pressed on the hordes of guests (nattily dressed to match the tulips). Towers and pyramids of thousands of tulips were embellished with cages of singing birds, while the flowerbeds were filled with hundreds of thousands of tulips. Unsightly gaps were plugged with blooms in bottles brought in from other gardens. The whole ostentatious lot was reflected again and again in hundreds of lamp- and candle-lit mirrors. You can understand why the Sultan's subjects got fed up, and revolted against him.
The tulips bred and selected by the Turks were long and slender blooms: "daggers" and "needles". They had fanciful names such as "One that Confuses Reason" and "Slim One of the Rose Garden" and could cost up to 28 gold coins - a bulb. Poets praised their beauty in rhyming couplets.
In Britain, meanwhile, an entirely different shape of tulip bloom was developing: a rounded chalice. At first the flower was the preserve of the well-heeled gentry, but in the mid-18th century - when the new fashion for a sweeping landscape style of gardening elbowed out the tulip - it was adopted by groups of urban artisan-growers.
But wherever it was grown, there was one magical thing that singled it out from other flowers, and that increased its desirability so much that in 17th-century France single bulbs were exchanged for a thriving brewery, a mill or other outrageous payments. In the Netherlands, amid the famous "Tulipomania" of 1634 to 1637 had bulbs being sold for the same price as a fine Amsterdam house, and had teetering tiers of dealers trading in shares for bulbs that never even left the ground.
That magical thing that fuelled the frenzy was the unpredictable ability of a bulb that was plain-flowered one year to "break" miraculously the next into a bloom that was stupendously striped, flamed and rippled - as if hand-painted by a Dutch master. Once a bulb had broken, it never reverted to its previous dull uniform, but continued to produce its splendid vestments year after year. Such bulbs were slow to form offsets (infant bulbs with identical characteristics) and became fabulously valuable.
Growers put all their energies into inducing particular plain-flowered varieties - known as "breeders" - to break into priceless stripes and flames. Recipes involved treating the soil with grape juice, pigeon dung, coloured sand, "water from jakes"; or cutting bulbs of different flower-colours in half, and binding the halves together. One British tulip-fancier imported a shipload of Dutch soil, convinced this would provide the necessary ingredient to make his bulbs break. He went bankrupt.
The "breeder" tulips were raised from seed obtained by meticulously crossing selected parents. But, it takes seven years for a seed to grow into a bulb of flowering size, and then, because the tulip has such superbly wayward genes there's no guarantee of the kind of bloom that will appear. After that, a bulb might take 10 or 20 years to break. Or it might never break. The people involved in tulip-growing were obsessive, dedicated and completely transfixed by the object of their passion.
Anna Pavord, the author, is the gardening correspondent for the London Independent, an associate editor of the glossy magazine, Gardens Illustrated, and has written a number of well-received books, including The New Kitchen Garden and The Border Book. She is a committed tulip-lover: "I'm working through the list, and I hope that by the time I die I will have grown every single one available to me" - several thousand varieties.
The Tulip, which weighs in at a packed and compelling 440 pages (including more than a hundred, sparkling coloured plates and 125 pages of clear and eloquent descriptions of 80 species and hundreds of cultivars) is a true labour of love. Unlike many garden-related books nowadays it was not commissioned by a publisher, "I wanted to do it for my own delight," says Pavord. "I didn't want some person saying, `Oh, that bit's boring', or `You can only have 20 illustrations'."
Her research began in earnest seven years ago when "instead of just looking at tulips and idly taking notes and making sure I planted masses of them in my garden" (2,500 last autumn) "I opened a file on my computer and labelled it very portentously `The Tulip'." Her quest for information sent her to several countries and to countless gardens, nurseries and libraries: "I adore research, particularly when it's something like this on which so little work has been done."
And when her steady curiosity led her to the work of the little known, 16th-century, French travel-writer Pierre Belon, she was exhilarated to find evidence that it was he who introduced the tulip to Europe - and not the Flemish Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, as had been previously believed. "I remember just wanting to leap out of my chair and jump up and down and chase after the librarian."
Her enthusiasm for her subject courses strongly through the book, and the reader is soon hooked on this most dramatic, mysterious and colourful of flowers. The tulip is a plant with personality: a scheming, subversive personality that for centuries confounded growers by suddenly throwing up a flower of a completely different colour, and that still continues to bamboozle the taxonomists by refusing to conform neatly to type.
However, one thing has been established: in the 1920s it was finally discovered that what caused tulips to "break" was not magic, but neither was it within the control of man. It was a trick of Mother Nature - and an ignoble one. Colour-breaking in tulips is caused by a virus that suppresses the top layer of colour on a flower petal. The virus is borne by aphids.
Gardening writer, Anna Pavord will be reading from The Tulip and signing copies at Waterstone's bookshop, Dawson Street, Dublin, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday