The Romance of the Black Tulip

I've long wished for a black garden and spent many an odd hour or two reasearching black plants that could grace this garden, and what should I come across but the black tulip. Superb!

The black garden is a figment of my imagination just at the moment although I now have plenty of space, (1.5 hectares!), at Les Trois Chenes, our guest house and holiday cottage in Limousin, S W France. Black flowers would make interesting subjects for our painting students, but galvanising myself into action is hard work these days, so I thought I'd start with a garden design as I am, after all, a landscape designer as well as an artist.

But then there is just so much to do in the flower and vegetable gardens at the moment that I thought perhaps I could create a plant list instead..... But there are just so many plants with black flowers of foliage .... so I decided to narrow it down to bulbs bearing black flowers. Even reducing the task to bulbs with black flowers was too overawing, and eventually I embarked on the modest task of discovering the delights of the black tulip.

Imagine how I felt when I moved from tulip to book, to film, to film of the book, to monuments in far flung places to ...... well, who knows where. Why not join me on the fascinating and mysterious trail of the black tulip.

The story of the tulip began in the middle East in the Ottoman Empire during the period, 1718 - 1730 called The Tulip Era. This was a relatively peaceful period, during which the Ottoman Empire can be said to have begun to orient itself towards Europe and this period derives its name from a tulip craze among the Ottoman court society.

The tulip could have arrived in Europe around 1558 however we know that Carolus Clusius planted tulips at the Imperial Botanical Gardens of Vienna in 1573 and in1593 he planted them at the Leiden University's newly established botanical garden. The popularity of the tulip grew in Holland eventually reaching such heights that the period during the Dutch Golden age was named Tulip mania or tulipo-mania. At this time prices for bulbs at the peak of tulip mania in 1637, reached giddy heights when a single tulip bulb could be sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. The link between the Netherlands and the tulip remains strong today.

The first tulips are thought to have been grown in the United States on the Fay Estate in Lynn and Salem, Massachusetts from 1847by Richard Sullivan Fay.

The idea of the black tulip has fired the imagination over the centuries. In 1672, Alexandre Dumas described in his novel how Cornelius van Baerle discovered 'La Tulipe Noire'. (See below). It wans't until 1891, however that the black tulip became a reality when the Dutch tulip grower Krelage brought a tulip onto the market with the name La Tulipe Noire despite the fact that it was more purple than black.

Other varieties of black tulip followed: Black Parrot, Black Beauty and Black Pearl. In 1895, Grullemans created the Queen of Night. But none of these varieties are a true black colour. During the mid1880's the grower and breeder Geert Jan Hageman had read Dumas' novel and fell under the spell of the mysterious black tulip. He crossed Wienerwald and Queen of Night to create the first tulip that genuinely seemed to be black. Hageman’s dream became reality.

• The Queen of Night tulip cultivar is the most common black tulip. The Queen of Night, a relatively tall perennial tulip reaching heights of 16 inches
• Negrita
• Black Swan
• Black Parrot
• Black Beauty
• Black Pearl
• Recreado cultivars
• Wienerwald
• Paul Scherer 45cm high said to be the darkest tulip available, beating old favourite 'Queen of the Night' in comparison trials.

• Gloria Nigrorum - Black Glory (dating from 1837) Also known as 'Violet Ponceau' and 'La Victorieuse.' It's one of the oldest surviving "Bijbloemen" (purple on white) broken tulips.

The Black Tulip was written by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas, a French writer, was born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie 1802 and is best known for his historical novels which include The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne.

First published in 1850, La Tulipe Noire begins with the lynching of the Dutch Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis in 1672. Although this was an historical even the main plot line continues with fictional characters. It is set in the city of Haarlem, Netherlands where a prize of 100,000 guilders will be awarded to the person who can grow a black tulip.

There have been several 'films of the book' and also films entitled The Black Tulip or La Tulipe Noire not based on Dumas's novel:

1. 1921 a Dutch-UK co-production directed by Maurits Binger and Frank Richardson.
2. Alex Bryce directed a well-regarded UK adaptation of the novel in 1937, with Patrick Waddington as Cornelus Van Baerle.
3. 1956 A 5-part BBC mini-series starred Douglas Wilmer in the lead role.
4. 1970 A second British mini-series was released.
5. 1988 Australia's Burbank production company created a 50-minute children's animated version of the story.
6. 1963 a movie called La Tulipe Noire with actor Alain Delon was produced in France (not based on the novel).
7. 1988 there was also a short Finnish documentary made by Pacho Lanein called The Black Tulip (again not based on the novel, it was based on the story of Soviet soldiers fighting in Afghanistan).

So this brings us to the question, does the black tulip exist? We would clearly like to think it does, but sadly, all the experts are adamant that the black tulip is really only a very deep purple flower. Does that spoil the romance? Not at all. Like the blue rose, the very impossiblity of creating the true black tulip seems to make the image a more potent one.

The fact that the black tulip cannot exist inspired the romantic name of the most expensive Chinese map in the world. The Impossible Black Tulip was a map created for an Emperor by an Italian Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, who went to China as a missionary.

The map, drawn in 1602 at the request of the Emperor Wanli, shows much of the world in surprising detail, notably in its depiction of the Americas, which the Chinese were not familiar with. Florida is mentioned as 'The Land of Flowers'.

This is a monument situated in Soviet Army Square in Yekaterinburg (also known as Ekaterinburg) Russia. The monument, finished in 1995, bears the namesof those citizens of Yekaterinburg and the Sverdlovsk region who were killed in wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other conflicts of the end of the 20th century. It consists of a negative tulip shape containing the hunched figure of a soldier who is surrounded by metal pylons, suggesting the carcass of a plane. The link to our theme lies not only in the shape of the pylons, but also in that the plane bringing home the bodies of soldiers was called the "Black Tulip".