Tulips' dramatic journey to Europe

In "Tulip Fever," the historical drama directed by Justin Chadwick, a pair of lovers place all their hopes in tulips. The film, released in the US on September 1, is set during the 17th-century tulip boom. The delicate flowers made some extremely wealthy, while others sank into poverty after the trend subsided. Can Sophie and Jan save their love affair with this risky business?

Many stories have been told about how the tulip made its way to Europe from the farthest reach of the Persian Empire. The sweetest is the story of a Dutch textile merchant who found a pair of ugly brown flower bulbs among his rolls of fabric. Without paying them any mind, he threw them into a pile of garbage. A few weeks later, the hill of trash had been transformed into a pile of exotic blossoms.

The path to Dutch soil took tulips on several detours. The Austrian emperor's ambassador to the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent wrote in his letters about the flowers he'd seen in the tulip lover's gardens and eventually brought them back to Vienna with him. The court botanist there later took a position at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands where he began to cultivate them.

The largest and most famous of the Netherlands' tulip farms is in Lisse, around 20 kilometers outside of Amsterdam. Keukenhof attracts nearly one million visitors annually from around the world. The brightly colored tulip fields are in bloom from late March through late May, featuring nearly seven million flowers and over 800 varieties.

What Keukenhof is to the Netherlands, is the Indira Gandhi Memorial Tulip Garden to India's Kashmir province. More than one million tulips are planted here, drawing many tourists. The monarch of the Mughal Empire, which stretched across vast parts of the Indian subcontinent, was so fascinated by tulips that he cultivated the flowers and planted tulip gardens across the empire in the 16th century.

Tulips have been bred for centuries, and still are today in the Netherlands even today. The variety known as Crispa - a genetic hybrid - is pictured here. Cross-breeding is done by removing pollen from one variety and placing it in the pistil of another. With a bit of luck, a new kind of tulip is born.

No sooner has the Christmas tree been tossed out, than the first vases of tulips are decorating tables across Europe. Although the flowers naturally bloom in April and May, those grown in greenhouses can be harvested earlier directly from the bulbs. Those grown outdoors are hearty and aren't damaged by a few snowflakes. The snow layer actually protects the flowers from frost.