Tulip flowers

The tulip bloom at the Missouri Botanical Garden was spectacular this year. Most of tulip pictures in this page were taken at the Bulb garden in April 2007.

The Garden planted over 90,000 spring-flower bulbs last year to produce a huge collection of tulips of different shapes and colors. If you drive around St. Louis area in April, you'll see tulips everywhere around office buildings, companies, apartments, private houses, public parks...

Although tulips are associated with Holland, both the flower and its name originated in the Middle East, where both are associated with turbans. Tulips were brought to Europe in the 16th century; the word tulip, which earlier in English appeared in such forms as tulipa or tulipant, came to us by way of French tulipe and its obsolete form tulipan or by way of Modern Latin tulīpa, from Ottoman Turkish tülbend, "muslin, gauze." (English word turban, first recorded in English in the 16th century, can also be traced to Ottoman Turkish tülbend.) The Turkish word for gauze, with which turbans can be wrapped, seems to have been used for the flower because a fully opened tulip was thought to resemble a turban