tulips

There's tulips and then there's tulips....

The story of tulips is a checkered one. Through plundering indiscriminately from their original countries, many of the wild varieties are extinct now and others face near extinction. The breeding programmes grew out of greed once the tulip bulbs reached the stock-markets. Vast sums of money changed hands and deservedly many investors went bankrupt. And that was some centuries ago. Since then greed has struck again while gardeners' tastes changed and the original wild forms become fashionable during the second half of the 20th century. Again areas were cleared out and more types became lost to the world. Nurserymen took advantage of feeble laws and lack of enforcement. Now at last people are coming to their senses, but for many plants it is too little too late.