''Tulipa aleppensis'' is a wild tulip in the family

Liliaceae The lily family, Liliaceae, consists of about 15 genera and 610 species of flowering plants within the order Liliales. They are monocotyledonous, perennial, herbaceous, often bulbous geophytes. Plants in this family have evolved with a fair ...

. It is native to Southeastern

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...

, near

Beirut Beirut, french: Beyrouth is the capital and largest city of Lebanon. , Greater Beirut has a population of 2.5 million, which makes it the third-largest city in the Levant region. The city is situated on a peninsula at the midpoint o ...

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, while Cyprus li ...

.Anna Pavord, The Tulip. Bloomsbury 1999, 289

Description

''Tulipa aleppensis'' belongs to the genus ''Tulipa'' (family Liliaceae). It is a herbaceous, bulbous perennial. The

tunic A tunic is a garment for the body, usually simple in style, reaching from the shoulders to a length somewhere between the hips and the knees. The name derives from the Latin ''tunica'', the basic garment worn by both men and women in Ancient Rome ...

of the bulb is covered with long straight hairs. It forms stolons. The leaves are erect and grey-green, frequently with wavy margins. They are up to 30 cm long and 5 cm wide.Richard Wilford 2006, Tulips, species and hybrids for the gardener, Portland, Timber Press, 77 The plant produces only a single cup shaped flower, which is intensely red or crimson on the outside and slightly paler inside. The tepals are pointed, the outer larger than the inner. The plant can be up to 45 cm tall. The basal blotch is oval, black and quite short. It can also be entirely absent; very rarely, it has a narrow yellow border. Filaments and anthers are black, the pollen yellow. The flowers appear from March to May. According to the British botanist

Alfred Daniel Hall Sir Alfred Daniel Hall, FRS, sometimes known as Sir Daniel Hall (22 June 1864 - 5 July 1942) was a British agricultural educationist and researcher who founded the Wye College in Kent. Life Hall was born in Rochdale, Lancashire where his fa ...

, it is quite similar to '' Tulipa praecox'', but has brighter flowers. It is triploid. Wilford suspects it of being a variant of ''

Tulipa agenensis ''Tulipa agenensis'' is a Middle Eastern species of flowering plant in the family Liliaceae. It is native to Turkey, Iran, Cyprus, the Aegean Islands, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, and naturalized in the central and western Me ...

'' or '' Tulipa iulia''. It is, however, shorter than T. agenensis and has more narrow tepals and a smaller basal blotch.

History

The plant was discovered near

Aleppo )), is an adjective which means "white-colored mixed with black". , motto = , image_map = , mapsize = , map_caption = , image_map1 = ...

by the German Botanist Carl Haussknecht. It was first described in 1873 by the German botanist Eduard August von Regel. In 1874, J. Gilbert Baker described it as ''Tulipa oculus-solis var. allepica Baker''.Richard Wilford 2006, Tulips, species and hybrids for the gardener, Portland, Timber Press, 78 As the plant is only found on cultivated land, Wilford suspects that it is a neo-tulip, descended from plants brought from

Central Asia Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...

by traders. Aleppo is near the end of the

Silk Road The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and reli ...

, after all.

Habitat

''Tulipa aleppensis'' is only found on cultivated land, for example, on fields or in

mulberry ''Morus'', a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, consists of diverse species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions. Generally, the genus has 64 identif ...

orchards, as recorded by Hall for the Lebanese species. It is listed on the IUCN red List of threatened Species. The plant is only rarely cultivated in gardens. It needs good drainage and protection from summer rain.

References

External links

Encyclopaedia of Live, herbarium specimen from the Royal Botanic Garden EdinburghInternational Plan names indexLiliaceae of the World
{{Taxonbar, from=Q15546311 aleppensis Ephemeral plants Flora of Western Asia Plants described in 1873 Taxa named by Pierre Edmond Boissier Taxa named by Eduard August von Regel Flora of Syria Flora of Lebanon