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Besides the Darwin Tulips, this group includes the Cottage Tulips, a collective name for all valuable older cultivars. These usually had a long, slightly pinched flower shape halfway down with pointed petals, so they did not meet the ideal shape of the English tulip lover. However, they still possessed the characteristics of the flamed tulips made famous by their depiction in Dutch flower paintings. The first result of attempts to grow a black tulip, “La Tulipe Noire” (1891), is among them, as is the still-popular “Queen of Night” (1944). The various cultivars from the Gesneriana subgroup also belong to it. It is a name given by Linnaeus in 1753, for want of a better one, to a group of older, low tulips probably descended from T. schrenkii, a highly variable species found from the Crimea to Kurdistan. It appears in the first illustration in the West of a tulip by Conrad Gesner in 1561. DNA testing of the older cultivars is the only method that might be able to give a definitive answer to this in the near future.
