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Hi this is Yolonda Vanveen on behalf of expert village. Tulips have a very sordid and exciting
history. They were originally found in the fourteenth and fifteenth century in Turkey
and parts of the middle east and then they were brought back to Europe where they became
the craze. There's been many books written about tulip mania but the facts are the first
tulips that were brought to Holland were as good as gold. People bet their houses their
farms their grocery stores every penny they could to buy the bulbs because they were worth
in their time millions of dollars for one tulip bulb but what happened was a lot of
times the bulbs would not make it over the winter or viruses attacked certain varieties
or they couldn't handle the cold wet dutch winters and they would lose a lot of them.
So then they would lose their whole fortune. So the stock market that we have today is
based on the tulip trade. So with out tulips we wouldn't have a stock market or we wouldn't
trade in that manner. Besides that, there's been hundreds of people that have hybridized
new varieties based on certain viruses. For example this parrot tulip the original stalks
didn't have parrots so it's a form of bursitis there'll be stripes on your flowers when they
get too wet sometimes. So originally these tulips had a virus called bursitis and it
created this mutant kind of tulip. Growers realized how beautiful the virused tulips
were so they started cloning them, or just growing them and that's how we've come up
with all the different varieties. So the history of tulip bulbs is really interlinked with
the history of the world and there's many different types of tulips that we're going
to examine in our next segment.