Winter Tulips

Tulips are sprouting in our backyard.  The daffodils are already in bloom, some beaten down by the recent rains, but raising their golden trumpets to the chill of winter.  One of the places I would like to visit (again) is Holland.  I’ve visited twice, and each time missed the tulip season with the stripes of color filling vast acres of land.

The Ottoman Turks discovered the wild tulips first.  Tulip in Turkish means “turban”, and these particular turbans were gorgeous.  An Austrian Hapsburg ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople stole a few bulbs and sent them west in the 1550s.  The Dutch, with such limited land space, filled their “jewel boxes” (window planters) with flowers.  Tulips did well and were a hit!  Tulipmania spread like wildfire.  Prices climbed until people were spending a fortune on a single bulb.  What goes up eventually comes down (like a housing market!), and the tulip market crashed.

The beautiful brilliantly colored tulips we see today aren’t the same as those Ambassador Busbecq sent west.  Tulips have been hybridized and have lost their original splashes (“breaks”) of color.   The tulips of Suleyman’s day can only be seen in Middle eastern paintings and ceramics and one in a Rembrandt. 

What’s the lesson? God’s original design was far more magnificent than what man hybridized.  Such is man’s ability to improve on God’s work.   Even so, by God’s grace, we still have man’s paler version of the tulip to enjoy.  And we have the promise that heaven is far more amazingly beautiful than anything we can even imagine -- and hopefully the one place in the universe where we will see God’s gloriously created tulips growing in His garden.