Tulip

The tulip is a flowering plant that grows from a bulb. Tulips are part of the lily family. They have smooth green leaves and a single cup-shaped flower at the top of a tall stem. Tulips come in almost every color, from deep purple to bright red to pure white. The only color they cannot make on their own is true blue.

Wild tulips first grew in the mountains and grasslands of central Asia, in places like modern-day Kazakhstan, Iran, and Turkey. People in Turkey began growing them in gardens hundreds of years ago. The word "tulip" comes from a Turkish word for turban, because the round flowers reminded people of the cloth wrapped around a person's head.

A tulip plant grows in a special way. Most flowers grow from seeds, but tulips usually grow from bulbs. A bulb is like an underground package. It holds food and a tiny baby plant inside. The bulb sits in the soil through the cold winter. When spring comes and the ground warms up, the plant pushes leaves and a flower up into the sunlight. Tulips actually need a cold winter to bloom well. Without weeks of cold, the flower will not open the next spring.

Tulips became famous in the country known as the Netherlands. Dutch farmers learned how to grow them in the 1500s, and people went wild for the flowers. In the 1630s, prices for rare tulip bulbs rose higher and higher. One bulb of a striped variety called Semper Augustus sold for the price of a fancy house in Amsterdam. Then, in 1637, the prices suddenly crashed. Many people lost everything. Historians call this event "tulip mania." It is often used as an early example of how people can get carried away with buying and selling.

Today the Netherlands still grows more tulips than any other country. Dutch farms produce about 4 billion tulip bulbs each year, which is enough to give every person on Earth half a tulip. Visitors come from all over the world to see the spring fields, which look like giant rainbow stripes painted on the ground.

Tulips also helped solve a science mystery. The famous striped tulips that drove people wild in the 1630s were not really a special type of plant. Scientists later learned that a plant virus made the petals split into bright streaks of color. The bulbs were sick, but the sickness made them beautiful.