A Flash Of Tulip Fever

Today was very overcast and grey and as my brother was still feeling the effects of covid I just decided on a short walk to the memorial garden in the Royal British Legion Village, just around the corner from home, where I spotted these tulips. 
The light was so poor that I had to use some fill in flash to capture my image but even in the gloom, with the somewhat featureless sky and the rather brutal looking brick wall in the background they still looked beautiful (I particularly like the yellow ones that look like they've just tried to squeeze into the frame). I took my shot from a lower angle to give them a sense of imposing scale.
They also made me remember reading a wonderful book called The Tulip by Anna Pavord. It tells the story of a flower that encompasses greed, desire, anguish, devotion and madness and how they all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian Steppes to the world-wide phenomenon it is today. 
It even had its very own mania, Tulip Fever, a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration stared in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637 which made great fortunes for people but was responsible for equally spectacular bankruptcies.
The book almost reads like a thriller in some places and is also beautifully illustrated. The author's premise is that no other flower has ever carried so much cultural baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts and even plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution. Quite a history!