TULIP FLOWER

Tulips are spring-blooming perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes in the Tulipa genus. Their flowers are usually large, showy, and brightly coloured, generally red, orange, pink, yellow, or white. They often have a different coloured blotch at the base of the tepals, internally.

Flowering in the spring, they become dormant in the summer once the flowers and leaves die back, emerging above ground as a shoot from the underground bulb in early spring.

Tulips were cultivated in Byzantine Constantinople as early as 1055 but they did not come to the attention of Northern Europeans until the sixteenth century, when Northern European diplomats to the Ottoman court observed and reported on them.[3] They were rapidly introduced into Northern Europe and became a much-sought-after commodity during tulip mania.