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The Tulip kicks off the 2018 Flower Agenda

18 December 2017

A New Year, a fresh start. The tulip is the perfect flower for welcoming in the New Year with its bright colours and astonishing varieties. Consumers can read all about this classic flower on Funnyhowflowersdothat.co.uk.  Introduce your customers to this Dutch beauty.

The tulip's origin 
In the wild, ulips can be found from North Africa and Southern Europe across to north-west China, with the greatest diversity in three mountain ranges in Central Asia: the Pamir, the Tian Shan and the Hindu Kush. The climate here is ideal for tulips, with its cold winters, long springs with cold nights and dry summers. Tulips need cold nights and a cold winter in order to be able to grow, which means that they cannot be cultivated in a warm climate.   

The tulip's shapes and colours
The ever-cheerful tulip comes in white, red, yellow, pink, purple, orange, green or with multicoloured petals, and the tulip’s shapes are also a feast for the eye. They're available with a single row, or double row of petals, whilst there are also eye-catching fringed and parrot tulips with serrated petals, and there’s the playful lily-flowered tulip. Peony tulips look like peonies, and French tulips are exceptionally tall (unlike the average French mademoiselle) and have very large flowers.   

Caring for tulips
With these care tips consumers can enjoy their tulips for 5 to 12 days:

Select a clean vase that’s tall enough: tulips will continue growing a few centimetres.
Add cut flower food to the water for a longer vase life.
Place the tulips in the vase for an hour wrapped in paper or film. The tulips will then suck up water and straighten up.
Use tap water at room temperature.
Trim the stems diagonally with a clean and sharp knife or secateurs.
Place the vase in a cool spot away from the fruit bowl and not in the sun.
Tulips drink a lot, so regularly top the vase up with tap water.
 

Tulip symbolism 
If you gave someone a tulip in the sixteenth century, you were giving them a fortune.  In those days the flower was incredibly popular and a speculative trade in tulip bulbs developed. You could buy a whole canal house in Amsterdam for the price of one tulip bulb in those days. A nice bunch of tulips now costs just a couple of pounds, but the symbolism has gained in value. If you give someone tulips, you’re giving them a message. Hence red tulips mean passionate love, and with black tulips you’re saying: “I love you so much that I will sacrifice everything for you.” So you don’t give those to just anybody.

Bouquet recipe with tulips 
It’s cold, grey and dark outside. The holidays are over, there's not much sun to warm you, and we’re sick and tired of the long commutes in the dark. Shed the down mood with a spectacular tulip bouquet, bursting with colour to turn that frown upside down. 

What you need:
 
Tulip
Hyacinth
Narcissus
Viburnum
Briza media (grass)
 
Inspiration and information
Read more about the Flower Agenda here.