Tulip - The Useless Flower

Among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless.

The tulip was a thing of beauty, no more, no less.

Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were source of medicine, perfume, or even food. In the West, flowers have often come under attack from various Puritans, and what has always saved them has been their practical uses. It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them.

When the tulip first arrived in Europe, people set about fashioning some utilitarian purpose for it. The Germans boiled and sugared the bulbs and unconvincingly declared them a delicacy; the English tried serving them up with oil and vinegar. Pharmacists proposed the tulip as a remedy for flatulence. None of these caught on, however. Herbert writes, “The tulip remained itself – the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.”
Pollan, the author of the bestseller The Botany of Desire think the particular character of the tulip’s beauty made it as good match for the Dutch temperament. Generally, bereft of scent, the tulip is the coolest of floral characters. In fact, the Dutch counted the tulip’s lack of scent as a virtue, a proof of the flower’s chasteness, and moderation. Petals curving inward to hide its sexual organs, the tulip is an introvert among flowers.

It is also somewhat aloof – one bloom per stem, one stem per plant.

The clean, steely stem holds the solitary flower up in the air for our admiration, positing its lucid form over and above the uncertain, shifting earth.

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The tulip's blooms float above nature's turmoil; even when they expire they do so gracefully. Instead of turning to mush, like a spent rose, or to used Kleenex, like peony petals, the six petals on a tulip cleanly, dryly, and often simulatenously, shatter.

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Source: Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire