By Josh Horowitz
As an estate guide at Winterthur, I’m often asked which flower is my favorite. It’s a hard question to answer, like asking which child you love the most, but I found my favorite flower here—not in the gardens, but in the Winterthur Library.
During a wander through the stacks sometime in early 2023, I came across the book Tulipomania by Mike Dash. Within the first five pages I was hooked. I purchased my own copy and over the next few months learned about the history and spread of tulips throughout the world. Tulipomania explores when tulip bulbs in the Netherlands became a hotly traded commodity in the early 17th century. This led to a mania, skyrocketing prices, and eventually an economic crash.
Through reading this book, I gained a deep passion for tulips. These humble bulbs endured a journey from the steep mountains of modern-day Kyrgyzstan in central Asia, through the royal gardens of the Ottoman empire, and into the sandy soil of the Netherlands where they became a part of the Netherlands’ national identity.
In April of 2024, I hosted a virtual Member lecture connecting Tulipomania to the Winterthur collection. I discovered that Henry Francis du Pont served as a member of the National Tulip Association from 1947–1951 and found orders for dozens of different varieties of bulbs that were grown in the Winterthur greenhouses and later displayed in the home.
While present-day tulips at Winterthur are mostly only planted in potted arrangements designed by the horticultural department, they appear on nearly every floor of the museum. In the Readbourne Parlor on the fourth floor, for example, a fireplace is surrounded by English delft tiles depicting tulips and fritillaria.
Tulips were a popular motif for the tile markets of Europe from the 17th through the19th centuries. When German and Dutch immigrants moved to Pennsylvania, they brought elements of their culture with them, and tulips are a common design motif on ceramics, furniture, fabric, and works on paper in the collection.
Inspired by my research, my wife and I chose the Netherlands as the destination for our elopement in 2024. Though we missed the tulips in bloom, we visited the floating flower market along the canals on our wedding day in Amsterdam. We bought a few dozen bulbs that day, whose leaves have recently appeared in our garden in Germantown. I planted around one hundred tulips that year and get to enjoy their display this year as spring greets us all.