The multiplication of tulips
Audio 02:42
Photo of tulips taken in Lille, France.
(Illustrative image) Getty Images / EyeEm - Andreas Distler / EyeEm
By: Florent Guignard
7 mins
Not a garden, or almost, without its blooming tulip at the beginning of spring.
It is one of the most popular flowers which sells in the billions every year.
Several thousand varieties of horticultural tulips have been created by human hands.
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They are everywhere.
Not a garden, a lawn, a flower bed or a planter without its tulips, in this early spring in the northern hemisphere.
Touches of red, yellow, pink, white ... Variegated flowers ... A festival of colors "
announcing sunny days
, notes Savinien Chatel, landscape gardener at the École du Breuil, who trains horticulturalists in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris.
It is beautiful, it is dazzling, you can see it from afar, you can use it in a bouquet, to garnish lawns, meadows ...
"
The tulip is one of the most popular flowers, because "
it heralds spring
", and does not require a lot of watering or care.
But most of those that can be seen in the gardens do not live in the wild.
They are not part of some 150 species of botanical tulips recorded in the world.
No, they were made by humans.
Hybrid species, called horticultural tulips, resulting from multiple crosses.
There are 5,000 varieties.
When the bulb makes little ones
"
We're going to take pollen from one species, put it on the pistil of another species, and harvest the seeds.
A very long process, since the tulip seed will take five to seven years to give its first flower
, explains Savinien Chatel.
When the tulips bloom, we keep the interesting flower bulbs for the variety sought.
This is where the second mode of reproduction that the tulip is lucky to have comes into play: vegetative reproduction, which will allow the bulbs to multiply.
The bulb, an onion, buried, is the heart of the plant, which accumulates, until the leaves turn yellow, the energy necessary for flowering the next spring.
As part of vegetative reproduction, the initial bulb will make small, bulbils.
"
It is from the moment the flower wilts that the bulbil will begin to develop, for one or two months
"
,
explains Savinien Chatel.
This is the reason why the large flowered and colorful tulip fields that can be seen in the Netherlands are not intended for the cut flower market (in this state, the tulips should have already been sold by a florist). , but at the tulip bulb market.
“
Each bulb can give birth to one to five bulbils
”, continues Savinien Chatel.
New bulbs, newborns to be sold.
Several billion tulip bulbs are thus produced each year in the world, a market in which the Netherlands, the other country of cloning, have a virtual monopoly.
"What do you call the bulb bubble?" "
It is a phenomenon known as tulipomania, which marked the beginning of tulip development in the Netherlands in the early 17th century.
The plant, arrived from Turkey, and still rare, is a luxury product.
A real frenzy takes hold of Dutch society.
The most sought after bulbs, and the most expensive, are two-tone, variegated.
Ironically, it is, we will learn later, tulips sick with a virus.
The price of a simple bulb can then reach 15 times the salary of a worker, and even the value of a house ... It is time for speculation.
A bulb of the bulb which will eventually explode;
humanity's first financial crash.
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