The first tulips in Europe were described by Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), a Swiss botanist and encyclopedist who had seen them in April 1559 in the garden of an Augsburg magistrate and painted the flower above, which looked to him like a red lily. It was published two years later in his De Hortis Germaniae Liber Recens (below), the first European illustration of the tulip
 |
The popular notion is that Busbecq introduced the tulip to Europe but, for him to have done so, the bulbs would have had to be sent from Constantinople within a few months of his arrival and planted in Bavaria almost immediately. Growing in areas long visited by the Crusaders, it is as likely that tulips were brought in through trade. |
In 1753, Linnaeus named the ornamental tulip after Gesner, which still is known as Tulipa gesneriana.
References: The illustration above is Tulip in the Garden of Johann Heinrich Herwart (1559) and taken from Tuliomania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007) by Anne Goldgar. The woodcut is from Tulipomania (1950) by Wilfrid Blunt.
