This is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has made men mad. Greed, desire, anguish, devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian steppes to the worldwide phenomenon it is today. The US alone imports three thousand million tulip bulbs each year, Germany and France even more.
Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? Anna Pavord, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, has spent six years looking for answers. No other flower has ever carried so much baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts, and plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution. Roaming through Asia, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, she tells how the tulip arrived from Turkey and took the whole of Western Europe by storm.
