The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Tulipa
Also called Tulips
Tulips are spring-blooming perennials grown from underground bulbs, and the genus has about 75 species, though most garden tulips are hybrids of a few. The key to growing them is planting bulbs in autumn in well-drained soil with a cold winter period.
Tulips are spring-blooming perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes in the Tulipa genus. Their flowers are usually large, showy, and brightly coloured, generally red, orange, pink, yellow, or white. They often have a different coloured blotch at the base of the tepals, internally. Because of a degree of variability within the populations and a long history of cultivation, classification has been complex and controversial. The tulip is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae, along with 14 other genera, where it is most closely related to Amana, Erythronium, and Gagea in the tribe Lilieae.
There are about 75 species, and these are divided among four subgenera. The name "tulip" is thought to be derived from a Turkish word for turban, which it may have been thought to resemble by those who discovered it.
As with other plants of the lily family, tulips are poisonous to domestic animals including horses, cats, and dogs. In cats, ingestion of small amounts of tulips can cause vomiting, depression, diarrhoea, hypersalivation, and irritation of the mouth and throat, and larger amounts can cause abdominal pain, tremors, tachycardia, convulsions, tachypnea, difficulty breathing, cardiac arrhythmia, and coma. All parts of the tulip plant are poisonous to cats, while the bulb is especially dangerous. A veterinarian should be contacted immediately if a cat has ingested tulip. In the American East, white-tailed deer eat tulips with no apparent ill effects.
Humans generally do not eat tulip bulbs, as they are slow to cultivate and safe preparation practices are not widely known. Although they resemble onions and are occasionally cooked as such, this has led to illness. In the Netherlands they were used as an ersatz ingredient and poverty food during the famine of 1944–45, and some chefs continue to offer them as a delicacy. Removal of the germ (the young stem) is an important preparation step.
Tulips are mainly distributed along a band corresponding to latitude 40° north, from southeast of Europe (Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Southern Serbia, Bulgaria, most part of Romania, Ukraine, Russia) and Turkey in the west, through the Levant (Syria, Israel, Palestinian Territories, Lebanon and Jordan) and the Sinai Peninsula. From there it extends eastwards through Jerevan (Armenia), and Baku (Azerbaijan) and on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan, Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent (Uzbekistan), to the eastern end of the range in the Pamir-Alai and Tien-Shan mountains in Central Asia, which form the centre of diversity. Further to the east, Tulipa is found in the western Himalayas, southern Siberia, Inner Mongolia, and as far as the northwest of China.
Armenian Tulip · Biflora Tulip · Tulipa bifloriformis · Lady tulip · Tulipa fosteriana · Didier's tulip · Tulipa greigii · Crocus Tulip · Water-lily tulip · Tulipa kolpakowskiana · Bokhara Tulip · Tulipa praestans
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tulip by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Pet safety from the ASPCA toxic and non-toxic plant lists.
