Today's entry marks the one-year anniversary of Botany Photo of the Day. I'll add a small retrospective when I return from vacation next week. Again, only an abbreviated entry today. – Daniel.

The story of the tulip and the economic bubble of the 1630s in The Netherlands is well-known, but worth revisiting from time to time. Barbara Schulman of the University of Minnesota has written a concise summary of “Tulipmania”, while the Wikipedia entry for Tulipmania adds a few dissenting opinions regarding the conventional history. On a different tack, Frontline's “dotcon” documentary web site has a compilation of various economic bubbles, including Tulipmania.

Today's photograph is of a tulip that would have been exempt from Tulipmania. Not only was it not discovered until nearly three centuries after the event, but it is also a “species tulip”, i.e., it is recognized as a natural species and (accordingly) has no history of human-induced hybridization. The tulips of Tulipmania were seemingly all hybrid tulips, many generations removed from their natural cousins.