The Tulip

Judging by its engaging introduction, The Tulip could have been a really good book. Unfortunately, it quickly degenerates into a stultifyingly lifeless slog through a laundry list of tulip varieties and tulip aficionados across four centuries. There are only twelve color plates for 268 pages of text, and as Pavord does not indicate to what portions of the text the plates refer, they are nearly useless.

Pavord may have penned six other books prior to The Tulip, but she is no historian. The text is badly organised, highly repetitive, and lacks the necessary context or structure to put the flower’s development into a historical perspective. Indeed, it reads like nothing so much as a shallow Cliff’s Notes of the sources Pavord lists in show more her bibliography. It also includes several pages of untranslated French that reek of pretension given the fact that Pavord obtained English translations for all the other non-English sources she quoted in the book. Pavord must have had an audience in mind when she penned The Tulip, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out who it was, and I doubt all but the most completist of readers will be able to make it through to the end. show less

Really interesting read. And so nice to think about tulips and Spring when the weather is so dreich.

I really wanted to love this, but I just lost interest way before the author was fully immersed in the subject. I'm a Philistine, I like pretty flowers. The original tulips were not all that attractive. But apparently they were nearly as tasty as onions.

A history of the domestication of the tulip and its spread into western Europe, with the subsequent explosion in popularity as it entered new regions. This book contains quite a bit of interesting information about the growth and fashion of tulips when they were first introduced as garden plants, as well as history of the layout and fashion of gardens in general, however it is slow-moving and somewhat repetitive. Part of this I believe is due to trying to expand the subject matter to fill more pages than it needs to be covered adequately, part due to the choice of dividing chapters by country or region and chronicling the flower's rise to - and fall from - the height of fashion in each one; the similarity in each region leads to a lot show more of "didn't I just read this?" show less

I picked this book up at the Smithsonian because The Botany of Desire is one of my favorite books and includes a section on tulips which I found to be especially interesting. Pavord's account of the tulip is very interesting although it, for me at least, moves a bit slowly. I've found myself having difficulty finishing it, but I don't think that is a reflection on the subject.

I read some parts of this book but it was a bit heavy going, so I am afraid that I will be passing it on unfinished.

A great history of the flower.