NDMC Tulip Festival opens, lights up Shanti Path in New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave

“We have been coming here for the past three years to enjoy the flowers and the colours. Both of us stay alone in our homes, and it is also an outing for us,” Chib said.

Baveja, sitting in her folding chair next to her friend in the shade of a tree, said she had tried to grow the flowers at home from bulbs, but had not succeeded.

“I bought four plants for Rs 350 each. They (the sellers) did not give us bulbs; they said you can’t grow them at home,” Baveja said.

On Monday, Shanti Path was flanked by beds of tulips spread out like a carpet, in colours of bright yellow, orange, deep red, pink, and white. Visitors, both couples and groups, walked slowly along the carpet of blooms, stopping to take pictures and pose for selfies. Cars passed slowly, their occupants taking in as much of the sight as they could.

NDMC Chairperson Keshav Chandra and Vice-Chairperson Kuljeet Singh Chahal were present along with the Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Marisa Gerards.

NDMC officials said some 5.5 lakh tulips were expected to bloom in the capital this season, with some 5.17 lakh of them springing from bulbs imported from the Netherlands. Of the 5.17 lakh, NDMC has planted about 3.25 lakh tulip bulbs in its areas while the rest have been used by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).

The Netherlands is the world’s preeminent grower and exporter of tulips. More than three quarters of tulip bulbs traded worldwide are grown in Holland, in fields spread over 60,000 acres. The country’s annual tulip exports, as bulbs or flowers, add up to more than $2 billion, according to the website of the Amsterdam Tulip Museum.

The biggest global markets for Dutch tulips are in the United States, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Tulips have become popular in India over the past decade and a half, and the flowers are grown mainly in public grounds in Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh.

Visitors, both couples and groups, walked slowly along the carpet of blooms, stopping to take pictures and pose for selfies. (Express Photo by Praveen Khanna)

An attempt to grow tulips in India had begun in 2022, when NDMC established a tulip growth-cum-storage chamber in Lodhi Garden. Officials said while around 15,000 indigenous bulbs on display at the festival was grown at this chamber, 20,700 had been supplied by the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (IHBT-CSIR), a constituent laboratory of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research at Palampur.

Thirty-nine-year-old Zumchung Tashi, who is visiting Delhi on vacation from Dharamshala in Himachal, was at Shanti Path with his
family. “Seeing the tulips was on my wife’s bucket list,” he said smiling.

Tashi’s wife, Tenzin Chodoi, also 39, chimed in: “I studied in Delhi University, but these days I see the tulips topping social-media lists of must-visit places in Delhi. We wanted a peaceful place to sit with our children, to be in the presence of nature beyond their textbooks.”

Baljeet Sharma, who said he lives in London and is visiting Delhi and Punjab with his family, said he was a nature and wildlife enthusiast, and very keen to visit the gardens of the capital.

“I have visited a few already, and today I wanted to see the tulips. I have been to the UK Tulip Festival…it is huge,” Sharma said. Asked if he thought there was something that Delhi could do differently with its tulips, Sharma said the city could consider growing them in a quieter place such as a public garden where more people could enjoy them for longer, rather than along a busy main road.

The earliest records of the existence of tulips describe them as red, yellow, and orange wildflowers with shorter stalks than we see now, growing in the Pamir and Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia, and the Caucasus range between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The earliest surviving physical representation of the flower is on tiles from the palace of the Seljuq Turkish sultan of Rum, Kayqubad I (1220-1237), in Konya in modern Turkey.

Tulips were cultivated in 10th century Persia, the poet-polymath Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) used the flower as a descriptor for feminine beauty, and in Nizami Ganjavi’s 12th century epic romantic poem Khosrow-Shirin (or Shirin-Farhad), tulips grow on the graves of the star-crossed lovers.

The tulip retains a strong cultural resonance in today’s Iran, where the ‘laleh’ is considered a national flower (along with the water lily and the damask rose). The highly stylised representation of the word Allah in the middle of the Iranian flag resembles a tulip, an ancient symbol of sacrifice and, in more recent times, of martyrdom and patriotism.

Tulips were introduced to western Europe in the 16th century, and were grown in Bavaria and France before the flowers took Holland by storm, the ‘tulpenmanie’ or Tulip Mania, in the 17th century. According to the website of the Amsterdam Tulip Museum, the craze started around the middle of the Dutch Golden Age (the period in which the Dutch led Europe in trade, scientific achievements, and art, usually seen as bookended by the years 1588 and 1672), among a handful of connoisseurs and, within a few decades, growers, middlemen, and speculators had begun to invest heavily in the trade in bulbs.

“By the mid-1630s almost anyone with money to spare seemed willing to risk it in the tulip market. Prices escalated exponentially. A single bulb sold one day for 46 guilders, then changed hands a month later for 515 guilders. Another bulb rose from 95 to 900 guilders in a similar period of time,” according to ‘The Story of the Tulip’ on the Museum’s website.

Tulips are today an inalienable icon of Holland, among the most recognised aspects of its national identity.

India’s – and Asia’s – biggest tulip garden is the Indira Gandhi Memorial Tulip Garden, previously known as the Model Floriculture Centre, in Srinagar. The garden, which was set up in 2007 with the aim of boosting floriculture and tourism in the Kashmir Valley, is spread over 30 hectares in seven terraces in the foothills of the Zabarwan range, with a view of the Dal Lake.

Besides tulips, other flowers such as daffodils and ranunculus are also grown in the garden. The annual Kashmir Tulip Festival, which usually opens in the last week of March, is a major draw for tourists.