In the sixteenth century the first tulip was imported to Turkey from Holland. I know-- I carried it myself.
By 1634 the Dutch were so crazy for this fish-mouthed flower that one collector exchanged a thousand pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single bulb.
What's so special about a tulip?
Put it this way...
When is a tulip not a tulip?
When it's a Parrot or a Bizarre. When it's variegated or dwarf. When it comes called Beauty's Reward or Heart's Reviver. When it comes called Key of Pleasure or Lover's Dream...
Tulips, every one-- and hundreds more-- each distinctively different, all the same. The attribute of variation that humans and tulips share.
It was Key of Pleasure and Lover's Dream that I carried from Sulyman the Magnificent to Leiden in 1591. To be exact, I strapped them under my trousers...
*(An excerpt from Jeanette Winterson's
The Powerbook...)
