The twigs outside my window have suddenly sprouted green bouquets and flashes of color are pushing up around the trees on the sidewalk. Spring is here and while I’m staring at the bunches on offer in my grocery store, I wonder which flower is everyone’s favorite. Luckily, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been counting.
Tulips are the most sold flower in the US, according to the most recent USDA report. More than 175m tulip stems were sold in 2020 – that’s one tulip for every two people. Although other flower species sell in huge numbers (83m gerbera daisies, 69m lilies), none comes close to the tulip, whose name comes from a Turkish word for turban.
According to flower historians, it’s hard to nail down a time when tulips weren’t a big hit in the US market. Some of it is the variety (so many colors are available as well as different petal types) and some of it is down to the availability of tulips (you can buy them pretty much year-round). But maybe the easiest explanation is simply price. As the ecologist Stephen Buchmann, author of What a Bee Knows, explained: “You rarely need to pay more than 40 to 50 cents each for a really nice tulip bulb.”
“Let’s be real – tulips have always been a hit and are a classic that will never go out of style,” says the horticulturalist and historian Abra Lee. “Their brilliant bursts are interesting, attractive and offer an explosion of color. While other blooms like daffodils and cherry blossoms offer a quiet and subtle awakening to spring, tulips arrive in grand fashion, are bold and shake the table, and are here to get the party started.”
For Dan Furman, owner of Cricket Hill Garden in Connecticut, tulips are all-rounders without the connotations of grief or romance. “They’ve been highly prized since the time of the Dutch golden age,” he says. “They’re early blooming flowers in temperate climates; they’re the platonic ideal of the flower in some ways and come in vibrant colors and they’re not messy … minimal and neat. Symmetrical and appealingly floppy.”
