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Tulips are of a genus (tulipa) of about 100 species of flowering plants that are in the family Liliaceae. They are widespread and are native to areas including southern Europe, north Africa, and also Asia from Anatolia and Iran (the flower is on the nation's flag) and also east to northeast China and Japan. The centre of diversity of the tulip genus is found in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountains and the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Tulips are perennial bulbous plants that grow 10-70 cm tall, and have a small number of strap-shaped, wax textured, most foten glaucous green leaves with large flowers that have six tepals. The fruit is found in a dry capsule containing numerous flat disc-shaped seeds.
Growing Tulips
The plants cannot be grown in the open in tropical climates because they require a cold winter season in order to grow successfully. However, the manipulation of the tulip's growing temperature can allow one to "force" them to flower earlier than they otherwise would.
Historically, some cultivars have had a striped or feathered or flamed or variegated flower. Some modern varieties can also display multicoloured patterns. Thes patterns result from a natural change in the lower and upper layers of pigment in the tulip flower. Variegated varieties like the ones that the Dutch have historically admired actually gained their delicately feathered patterns from a viral infection. The mosaic virus is carried by peach potato aphids, Myzus persicae, which is an insect that was common in European gardens of the seventeenth century, in which a predominant feature was often peach trees. While the virus produces fantastically beautiful flowers, it also unfortunately causes the them to sicken and die slowly. Today, this aphid has been almost completely eradicated from tulip growers' fields.
They can be grown in one of two ways: through offsets or from seed. The only way to enlarge the stock of a given tulip cultivar is by cloning of the parent plant.
By contrast however, they do not come true from seed; as the mixing of genes between two parent plants is very unpredictable.
Those grown from seed will usually bear but only a very passing resemblance to the flower from which the seeds were actually taken. The benefit of this is that it makes for great potential in breeding new tulip flowers, and makes for fantastic variation in the wild. Tulip growers must be patient as clones often take a minimum of a year to grow to sufficient size to flower. What's more, a tulip grown from seed will not flower anywhere for between five to seven years after planting!
"Broken" tulips, or those that are affected by the mosaic virus, will occasionally revert back to plain "breeder" colouring however they will usually maintain their colourful, infected state when grown from offsets. | 
