Thursday Reading Comp
| Tulips, Turkey, and Wooden Shoes By Mary L. Bushong |
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1 Have you ever wondered what tulips, Turkey, and wooden shoes have in common? Well, if you are talking about the turkey bird, not much. If you are talking about the country of Turkey, they have a lot in common. It's quite a story.
2 You might think that tulips come from Holland, but that is not true. Tulips grew wild in Turkey, up in the mountains. You can even find some wild tulips growing today in the mountains of Europe. Most of those are very different from the kinds we grow in our gardens.
3 The Turkish people were cultivating tulips more than 1,000 years ago. Long before they were grown in European gardens, they were popular in Turkey. The name tulip came from the headdress or head wrapping men wore, the turban or toliban. When that name was changed to Latin, it became "tulipa."
4 In the late 1500's the bulbs were imported to Europe and especially to Holland. If you look at old color pictures or "plates" of tulips, you will see that some of the flowers were striped. The broken lines of color showed that the bulb was diseased, but people did not know that. They would try to grow them for those color patterns. Now you can buy healthy bulbs with those colors.
5 According to tradition, the first tulip bulbs were brought to Holland by Carolus Clusius or Charles de L'Ecluse. He was a botanist (a man who knows about plants). He moved from Germany to Holland to become the head of a botanical garden at the University of Leiden. He brought his collection of tulips and planted them at the school.
6 Clusius thought the tulips were good to study as part of science. He would not sell or let anyone else have them. Some people thought they would be good to grow and took matters into their own hands. A few of them sneaked into the garden and stole some of the collection. Up until this point, only plants that could be used for medicine or food were thought to be important, but the tulip was included with them. That is how important the flower became to the Dutch people.
7 At first only the rich could afford to buy tulips because they were so rare. They were grown in small plots, but that changed as people reproduced them. By 1624 people were so crazy for tulips that a single tulip bulb sold for an amount that would equal $1,500 U.S. today. There were just twelve of these maroon and white bulbs available. Some bulbs sold for more than the cost of a house!
8 In 1637, "The Foolish Tulip Trade" bubble burst. Dishonest people sold notes, promising a certain tulip in the summer and fall when the bulbs were out of the ground for planting. Many of these pieces of paper were sold all over the country like it was part of a stock market. Sometimes there were no real bulbs to go with the paper. People who thought themselves rich one night woke up the next morning with nothing. The market for tulips had crashed.
9 While the Dutch have kept their love affair with tulips, they no longer cost a lot of money. Now just about everyone can enjoy their beauty in the spring. Perhaps you have some of them in your garden.
Copyright © 2013 edHelper
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