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home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives What’s Blooming this Week: Tulips

What’s Blooming this Week: Tulips

By Kelli Hansen   Posted in Resources and Services Special Collections and Archives
Posted on

Nothing says "spring" like a cheerful tulip! This week, we're featuring a colorful planting of them from the Mizzou Botanic Garden.  These can be found on Lowry Mall, just off the northwest corner of Ellis Library.  In the photo, you're seeing the iconic dome of Jesse Hall and the windows of Tate Hall in the background.

Tulips are native to the Mediterranean and Asia, and they were introduced to Western Europe around the end of the sixteenth century.  They were (and still are) prized for their bright, showy flowers, and they became a symbol of status and luxury.  You've probably already heard about the tulip craze in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, during which tulip bulbs sold for exorbitant sums to speculators.  The tulip market reached a bubble in 1636 and crashed in 1637. 

Unsurprisingly, tulips play a major role in one of the finest works on flowers published in the Netherlands during this period.  Crispijn van de Passe's Hortus floridus (1614) is a florilegium, a book on flowering plants that discusses their ornamental, rather than medicinal uses (as we saw last week).  Hortus floridus illustrates each plant at ground level, as it would have grown in a garden, and the plants are arranged by their bloom season.  The beautifully detailed engravings were meant to be hand-colored, with descriptions noting what colors to use.  Striped tulips, seen in the engravings below, were the most highly valued during this period.

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MERLIN catalog record

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives What’s Blooming this Week: Lenten Rose

What’s Blooming this Week: Lenten Rose

By Kelli Hansen   Posted in Resources and Services Special Collections and Archives
Posted on

For this last week of Lent, our featured plant from the Mizzou Botanic Garden is helleborus orientalis, or Lenten Rose.  You'll find them blooming on the west side of Ellis Library.  The plants in the photo are just outside the entrace to Ellis Auditorium.

Lenten rose

Helleborus orientalis is native to Anatolia and was not introduced to European gardens until the mid-1800s.  It is grown primarily for its ornamental value. However, there are several other species in the hellebore family, and they were used medicinally in Europe for thousands of years.  In Medical Botany (London, 1790), William Woodville provides illustrations of two hellebores related to those growing on campus: Helleborus foetidus, or Bear's Foot, and Helleborus niger, or Christmas Rose.

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Woodville’s book is a work on plants, but he’s primarily interested in their medicinal uses.  Woodville writes that Helleborus niger was introduced in England in 1596, while Helleborus foetidus was “constantly used in medicine from the time of Hippocrates [and] was the only species of Hellebore known in the Materia Medica of our pharmacopoeias.”   He notes:

The smell of the recent plant is extremely fetid, and the taste is bitter, and remarkably acrid, insomuch, that when chewed, it excoriates the mouth and fauces; it commonly operates as a cathartic, sometimes as an emetic, and in large doses proves highly deleterious.  (54)

Of course, the Helleborus orientalis growing on our campus may have different properties than its cousins H. foetidus and H. niger.  It goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway: the information provided here is most certainly not meant to provide any form of medical advice!

Many thanks to David Massey, a research specialist at Landscape Services, and to Pete Millier, director of the Mizzou Botanic Garden, for lending their wisdom for this post.