[39] Epist. 115.
[40] La Sicilia inventrice. Palermo, 1704, 4to.
TULIPS.
The greater part of the flowers which adorn our gardens have been brought to us from the Levant. A few have been procured from other parts of the world; and some of our own indigenous plants, that grow wild, have, by care and cultivation, been so much improved as to merit a place in our parterres. Our ancestors, perhaps, some centuries ago paid attention to flowers; but it appears that the Orientals, and particularly the Turks, who in other respects are not very susceptible of the inanimate beauties of nature, were the first people who cultivated a variety of them in their gardens for ornament and pleasure. From their gardens, therefore, have been procured the most of those which decorate ours; and amongst these is the tulip.
Few plants acquire through accident, weakness, or disease, so many tints, variegations, and figures, as the tulip. When uncultivated, and in its natural state, it is almost of one colour, has large leaves, and an extraordinary long stem. When it has been weakened by culture, it becomes more agreeable in the eyes of the florist. The petals are then paler, more variegated, and smaller; the leaves assume a fainter or softer green colour: and this masterpiece of culture, the more beautiful it turns, grows so much the weaker; so that, with the most careful skill and attention, it can with difficulty be transplanted, and even scarcely kept alive.
That the tulip grows wild in the Levant, and was thence brought to us, may be proved by the testimony of many writers. Busbequius found it on the road between Adrianople and Constantinople[41]; Shaw found it in Syria, in the plains between Jaffa and Rama; and Chardin on the northern confines of Arabia. The early-blowing kinds, it appears, were brought to Constantinople from Cavala, and the late-blowing from Caffa; and on this account the former are called by the Turks Cavalá lalé, and the latter Café lalé. Caval is a town on the eastern coast of Macedonia, of which Paul Lucas gives some account; and Caffa is a town in the Crimea, or peninsula of Gazaria, as it was called, in the middle ages, from the Gazares, a people very little known[42].
Though florists have published numerous catalogues of the species of the tulip, botanists are acquainted only with two, or at most three, of which scarcely one is indigenous in Europe[43]. All those found in our gardens have been propagated from the species named after that learned man, to whom natural history is so much indebted, the Linnæus of the sixteenth century, Conrad Gesner, who first made the tulip known by a botanical description and a figure. In his additions to the works of Valerius Cordus, he tells us that he saw the first in the beginning of April 1559, at Augsburg, in the garden of the learned and ingenious counsellor John Henry Herwart. The seeds had been brought from Constantinople, or, according to others, from Cappadocia. This flower was then known in Italy under the name of tulipa, or tulip, which is said to be of Turkish extraction, and given to it on account of its resembling a turban[44].
Balbinus asserts that Busbequius brought the first tulip-roots to Prague, from which they were afterwards spread all over Germany[45]. This is not improbable; for Busbequius says, in a letter written in 1554, that this flower was then new to him; and it is known that besides coins and manuscripts he collected also natural curiosities, and brought them with him from the Levant. Nay, he tells us that he paid very dear to the Turks for these tulips; but I do not find he anywhere says that he was the first who brought them from the East.
In the year 1565 there were tulips in the garden of M. Fugger, from whom Gesner wished to procure some[46]. They first appeared in Provence, in France, in the garden of the celebrated Peyresc, in the year 1611[47].