Tracing the origins of tulips: Interview with botanist Brett Wilson

A genetic analysis of 254 tulip specimens covering roughly 86% of known species has traced the plant's origin to broader Central Asia around 32.5 million years ago, according to botanist Brett Wilson, co-founder of the IUCN SSC Wild Tulip Specialist Group. The study, built on fieldwork across Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan between 2019 and 2021, also identifies Tulipa suaveolens and T. scardica as the likely closest wild relatives of the earliest garden cultivars.

Wilson notes the finding undercuts national claims to the tulip's origin, including Kazakhstan's assertion of being its birthplace, since no modern borders existed when the ancestral lineage emerged. The research also flags a conservation problem: 27 of 53 assessed Central Asian tulip species are already threatened with extinction.

The study further complicates the popular Ottoman-and-Persian-empire origin story for garden tulips, pointing instead to a scented steppe species ranging across eastern Europe, Russia and Kazakhstan, and a Balkan relative, as likely ancestral stock.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.