Earlier this year, we went on holiday to the south of France and I
had particularly envisioned photographing spring flowers on this trip.
The plant I was most interested in finding was the wild tulip. Most of
us know tulips very well because they grow in gardens and appear in
flower shops in a plethora of colors and flower shapes (examples were shown in earlier
posts here and here), but there are several wild forms, some of which occur in Europe
(even in Switzerland). However, I had never seen a wild tulip and on our trip we did not discover a lot of
wildflowers except fir one particular afternoon. We had hiked all day long
through the Gorges du Verdon, on the Sentier Martel, and had almost made
it back to the parking lot at Pointe Sublime, when I stumbled upon the
beautiful yellow wild tulip shown here; its scientific name is Tulipa sylvestris ssp. australis.
In the photograph above, the "classical" structure of a flower belonging to the lily family (Liliaceae;
the group of plants the tulip belongs to) is easily recognized. It
consists of three sepals (the outer ring of yellow "leaves") and three
petals (the inner ring of yellow "leaves"), which look almost identical
in most tulips. However, in the two photographs below you can see that
the sepals and petals in this wild tulip differ in their color. Moving
further towards the center of a typical lily flower follow six stamen,
which are again arranged in an outer and an inner group of three.
Finally, the stigma in the center is typically tripartite. This flower
structure and also the overall shape of wild tulip plants closely
resembles their cultivated descendents, but the wild relatives look like
miniature versions of the bred cultivars. At least the specimen that we
have encountered was much smaller, inconspicuous, and rather difficult
to spot.
Sepals and petals of Tulipa sylvestris ssp. australis.
Tulipa sylvestris ssp. australis, the particular subspecies of tulip that we encountered and that is shown here, is one of over 70 species of wild
tulips. Their natural range extends from Spain and Portugal all the way
to China, while the largest number of different species are found in
Central Asia. Tulipa sylvestris ssp. australis is characterized by the reddish color on its sepals and petals, which can easily be distinguished in the photograph above. The outside of the sepals is covered by a reddish color, while the petals only have a thin red line.
