Brett Wilson:<\/strong> The tulip is one of the most intensively bred plants in history and one of the worst-documented \u2014 we are effectively doing forensics on a crime scene that is now over five centuries old.<\/p>\nStart with the escapes. Tulips have a long history of hopping the garden wall and establishing \u201cwild-looking\u201d populations well outside their native range. Telling a genuinely wild population from a 400-year-old garden escape is one of the hardest calls in the whole genus.<\/p>\n
Then stack three more problems on top. First, human hands: Bulbs have been carried along trade routes for the best part of a millennium, so today\u2019s distributions are a poor guide to natural ones. Second, there was almost certainly no single founding parent, but a whole cast of species crossed and re-crossed over centuries \u2014 which is why the candidate list narrows rather than resolves. Third, sampling: Some of the most important regions are the hardest to work in. Iran is difficult, and now Russia and Ukraine too, which leaves gaps precisely where some of the answers lie.<\/p>\n
And finally, the biology. Tulips are all extremely closely related, so pulling them apart genetically has historically been very hard indeed.<\/p>\nTulipa kaufmanniana<\/em>, also called the waterlily tulip. The species was historically used in the breeding of many cultivars known as the kaufmanniana cultivar group. Image courtesy of Brett Wilson.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nMongabay: How are tulips doing in the wild?<\/strong><\/p>\nBrett Wilson:<\/strong> There are 62 wild tulip species assessed on the Red List, and the great majority \u2014 53 \u2014 are Central Asian.<\/p>\nOf the species assessed so far, 32 are threatened. So more than half of the wild tulips we have managed to assess are already at risk of extinction. For a flower this famous, it may surprise people how rare its wild relatives have become.<\/p>\n
Mongabay:<\/strong> What are the major threats to wild tulips?<\/p>\nBrett Wilson: <\/strong>The two threats that come up again and again are livestock overgrazing and climate change. Grazing pressure hits tulips directly \u2014 bulbs trampled, flowers eaten before they can set seed \u2014 and a warming, drying climate is squeezing mountain species upslope with nowhere left to go while more unpredictable weather can lead to landslides and floods.<\/p>\nThen there are threats that are devastating for particular species rather than the genus as a whole: Mining, infrastructure development, and overcollection of bulbs from the wild. For a narrow-range endemic sitting on a single hillside, any one of those can be an extinction event on its own.<\/p>\nA farmer\u2019s sheep grazing in the pasture at the foot of Kyrgyzstan\u2019s northern Tien Shan mountains. Image courtesy of Brett Wilson.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nMongabay: Is overcollection of tulip bulbs from the wild a big threat to species? And are there tulip species that are rare in the wild but\u00a0abundant in nurseries or botanic gardens?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nBrett Wilson:<\/strong> Overcollection hits a small number of species hard. The classic victims are the big, showy red-flowered species growing close to settlements: Tulipa fosteriana<\/em> in Uzbekistan and Tulipa praestans<\/em> in Tajikistan have both been collected heavily, and both are now assessed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.<\/p>\nThe good news is that we see no large international trade in wild-collected tulips. Commercial breeding runs almost entirely on cultivar material. We do note some wild material collected in recent years, possibly entering breeding without clear permits, but this is small-scale and driven by tulip fanatics rather than industry. More than half of Central Asian wild tulip species are now assessed as threatened with extinction \u2014 that is the number to keep in mind.<\/p>\n
And to the second half of your question \u2014 there is a real irony here. Some of the species most depleted in the wild are the ones you can buy by the barrowload. Tulipa greigii<\/em>, T. kaufmanniana<\/em> and T. fosteriana<\/em> are the wild ancestors behind entire garden tulip groups, sold in their millions every autumn, while their wild populations in Central Asia are declining and their historic range is substantially depleted. Abundance in a nursery or a botanic garden tells you nothing about whether a species is still holding on in the wild.<\/p>\nMongabay: For species rare in the wild, do cultivated individuals count toward the species\u2019 population, and can they be introduced into the wild again?<\/strong><\/p>\nBrett Wilson:<\/strong> Plants in collections absolutely do count towards a species\u2019 overall survival prospects; they are one of our best insurance policies against extinction. But usually when we measure a population, we count wild individuals in natural habitat, because those are the plants established, reproducing and surviving in nature. The goal is always self-sustaining wild populations.<\/p>\nThe complication is hybridisation. Tulip cultivars and wild species cross-breed happily in nurseries and collections, producing genetic combinations that never occurred in nature, and we must not release that into the wild. Where hybridisation can be ruled out, there is no reason we cannot reinforce wild populations with collection-grown plants, which is exactly why we have been building up ex situ<\/em> collections in botanic gardens across Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well as places like Cambridge University Botanic Garden, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Gothenburg Botanic Garden, so that restoration becomes possible for species that have vanished from sites or whose populations need a hand. For the very rarest species, those collections are priceless.<\/p>\nReintroduction still has to be done carefully: No hybrids, good survival rates for bulbs and seed, and only into places where the original threats have actually been reduced.<\/p>\n
In short: Keep the cultivated collections, treasure them, and use them \u2014 but the measure of success is tulips thriving on their own in the wild.<\/p>\nYellow Tulipa greigii<\/em> found growing in the Shamshy valley of northern Kyrgyzstan. This species was historically used in the breeding of the many cultivars now known as the greigii cultivar group. Image courtesy of Brett Wilson.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBanner image: <\/strong><\/em>Tulipa anadroma, a threatened tulip species, growing in the Sary-Chelek Biosphere Reserve in western Kyrgyzstan in early 2019. This protected area is the only place on Earth where the species can be found. Image by Brett Wilson.<\/em><\/p>\nCitation: <\/strong><\/p>\nWilson, B., Christenhusz, M. J., Walker\u2010Hale, N., Beshko, N., Boboev, M., Clubbe, C., \u2026 Brockington, S. F. (2026). Phylogenomic insights into the genus Tulipa (Liliaceae): Taxonomy, evolution, and biogeography. American Journal of Botany<\/em>, e70232. doi:10.1002\/ajb2.70232<\/a><\/p>\n\n
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