Tulips arrive here out of season and out of place. A box comes into the studio in January, cold to the touch, from a grower in the Pacific Northwest or a field in the Netherlands, and I open it in that flat white light Los Angeles gets for about three weeks a year. Cold-country flowers in a city that has never given them a proper winter. People ask me about tulip meaning more often than any bloom except the rose, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on which century you happen to be standing in.
Where the Tulip Meaning Actually Starts
Not in Holland. Tulips are Central Asian mountain flowers, and they were being cultivated in Iran by the tenth century and prized in the Ottoman court by the fifteenth, where they became a symbol of the empire itself — paradise, and divine favor. The Turkish name is lale, from the Persian laleh, and in Arabic script those letters carry the same shape as the name of God, which is not a coincidence anyone there considered accidental.
Our word for the flower came sideways. It traces to the Ottoman tülbend, by way of the Persian dulband — turban — apparently for the shape of the closed bloom. Some scholars think it was simply a mistranslation, a European ambassador's guide answering the wrong question in the 1550s. Either way, half the world calls this flower by a word its own people never used for it.
The oldest meaning is the one that has lasted. In Persian legend, a stonecutter named Farhad loves a princess named Shirin and is falsely told she has died; where his grief touched the ground, red tulips came up. That is why a red tulip means perfect love, and it has meant it for a very long time.
Then the Dutch Briefly Lost Their Minds
Tulips reached Vienna in 1573, planted by the botanist Carolus Clusius, who carried them on to Leiden twenty years later. The first flowering in the Netherlands is dated to 1594. Within forty years the country had produced the first recorded speculative bubble in history — tulip mania, roughly 1634 to 1637, when a single Semper Augustus bulb went for ten thousand guilders, something like a hundred and thirty thousand euros today.
Here is the part I find hard to get over. The flames and feathering that drove those prices — the streaked petals everyone was ruining themselves for — were a disease. The tulip breaking virus, carried bulb to bulb by aphids. The most valuable flower in Europe was a sick one, and it got weaker every year it was propagated. Today's striped tulips are bred that way, and they're healthy, and to my eye they are not quite as beautiful.
What Each Color Was Told to Say
The Victorian flower dictionaries assigned tulips a vocabulary, the way they did with roses. Red was a declaration of love — stated outright, not hinted. Purple meant undying love, and carried the older note of royalty. Yellow meant hopeless love, which it has since shed entirely; now it reads as nothing more complicated than cheerfulness. A variegated tulip meant you have beautiful eyes, which is the single most specific message I have ever found in one of those books.
I like knowing all of it and I don't hand anyone a rulebook. If a tulip needs to say something precise, that is what the card is for.
A Tulip in Los Angeles
Nothing about this city suits them. To bloom here a bulb needs ten to fourteen weeks in a refrigerator at around forty degrees, kept well away from any ripening fruit — ethylene gas will quietly kill the flower bud inside before it ever sees soil. You plant in late December or January, when our ground is as cold as it gets, and you accept that the bulb will not come back. Our summers are too warm for it to recharge. Here, tulips are annuals. You buy them again every year, knowing.
And once they're cut they refuse to settle. A tulip keeps growing in the vase — a centimeter or two a day — and bends toward whatever light it can find. An arrangement you build on Tuesday has quietly rearranged itself by Thursday morning. Most flowers hold the pose you give them. Tulips renegotiate.
That is the tulip meaning I'd actually offer, after all the dictionaries: a flower that keeps moving after you think the decision has been made. If you want some, come by the studio in the new year, or find the van on Abbot Kinney and see what came in cold that week.
