In Persian poetry the red tulip is the flower of perfect and often martyred love, said to have sprung from the blood of the lover Farhad, who died for the princess Shirin, so that a field of red tulips was a field of the blood of lovers, an image that also made the flower an emblem of the martyr. Carried west, the tulip provoked in the Dutch Republic the famous speculative bubble of the 1630s, tulip mania, when single rare bulbs changed hands for the price of houses before the market collapsed. Sacred anagram, martyr's blood and object of the first great financial mania, the tulip carries an unusually wide span of meaning for a garden flower.
The Netherlands remains, centuries later, the tulip's commercial capital in a way the Ottomans who first cultivated it never were: the country grows and exports the great majority of the world's tulip bulbs today, and the Keukenhof gardens near Lisse, opened to the public in 1950, display millions of tulips each spring and have become one of the most visited flower gardens on earth, a thoroughly modern industry and tourist attraction built on a flower with a much older and more freighted symbolic history. The flamed and feathered petal patterns most prized in Dutch tulip mania, seen in famous cultivars like Semper Augustus, are now understood to have been caused by the tulip breaking virus, an aphid-borne infection unknown to seventeenth-century growers, who prized the broken colour without knowing it marked an infected, and gradually weakening, bulb.