The flower that isn't really Dutch

Everyone assumes the tulip belongs to the Netherlands, and I did too until I looked into it. It actually started out as a wild flower growing in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Persian poets were writing about it centuries before it reached Ottoman palace gardens, where it became a genuine obsession, and it didn't arrive in the Netherlands at all until the late 1500s, carried along Ottoman trade routes.

Once it landed, the Dutch took it somewhere new entirely. Between 1634 and 1637, a single rare bulb could sell for more than a house in Amsterdam, a speculative frenzy now remembered as tulip mania. So the flower's Dutch identity is only a few centuries old, layered on top of a much longer story that started a continent away.

I painted a bicycle with tulips in the basket, watercolour and ink, that classic Amsterdam combination. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Bicycle and Tulips, Amsterdam · Travel Poster