Maureen Gilmer

Special to The Desert Sun

Underneath the elegant beauty of tulips lies a twisted legacy of mutations dating back hundreds of years. These are real changes in the genetics of the plant much like cellular engineering today. Tulip breeders who came out with new colors, shapes and forms dominates the marketplace and earn fast sales. After all, during the 17th century tulip craze in Holland, these oddballs were worth a small fortune.

The earliest of these mutations were strictly about color. They were at first considered broken, diseased and infectious. They needed to be held in quarantine. Known as “rectified tulips," these afflicted beauties are the most unusual of all.

What made a tulip break its color was at first a mystery. Something was marring the beautiful solid hue flowers rendering them unpredictably striped and blotched. Yet everybody wanted one, so growers tried desperately to force the strange anomaly to flourish. They tried applications of pigeon droppings, old plaster and even dirty waste water from the kitchen. Thinking color had some effect, they sprinkled powdered paint across the beds to no avail.

Not until the late 19th century was the mosaic virus finally deemed the cause of broken tulips. Further study proved it is transferred from tulip to tulip by a tiny insect vector — the aphid.

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The virus radically disturbs color in the flower. A solid colored tulip infected will suddenly “break” or rectify into a bizarre blend of irregular flame or feather-like markings. These original virus-vulnerable, broken varieties became the predecessors of contemporary, color-stabilized Rembrandt tulips.

Parrot tulips are children of the nuclear age, mutated beyond recognition by radiation. In the 1970s growers used radiation in their fields to stimulate mutations of flower shape in the field. Some made flowers so twisted they barely resemble their parents. Each year growers would scour the fields for them at certain times of year. Yes, parrot tulips are just weird, and may turn off traditional gardeners. But for the lover of beautiful color and exciting forms, they are the most coveted of all.

Mother Nature has little to do with their creation. Parrots appear serendipitously when the genetic material inside other plants goes haywire during cell division. Called de novo mutations, their color and form is not inherited but occurs at unusual times in the plant life cycle. These individuals will then be propagated asexually by cutting or by bulb so that the new plants are identical to their genetic predecessor.

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Parrot tulips are so named for unusually bright flowers. They are appealing to artists and free spirits who worship individuality and nuance. Today’s highbrow designers gravitate toward their bizarre shapes and colors as the most trendy moderns, whether as cut flowers or in gardens.

Parrots were rare before the 20th century and shunned because their stems were notoriously twisted too, making them less than ideal for traditional bouquets. They tended to flop in gardens, lying in the mud to get lost in the rain. But with the discovery of stiffer-stemmed ‘Fantasy’ in 1910, parrots experienced a renaissance.

For those who love exotic tulips, the mutants offer some really outside the box looks for modern-style gardens and very traditional ones. If you're bored with the same shapes, colors and sizes and want something that's so unique that no two flowers are identical, mutant tulips are supreme. With Rembrandt and parrot tulip varieties, each flower is a work of art and every bouquet becomes an art museum.

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