This plant caught my eye due to martind spotting it recently. If you want to catch Tulipa cypria in the wild then, realistically, you’ll have to wait till next year. Tulipa cypria, the Cyprus Tulip is a plant that flowers within two narrow limits.

First, to see it, you’ll have to get to Cyprus. You’ll find it on the north side of the island, and nowhere else on the planet. The IUCN listed it as endangered with between 2,000 and 6,000.

The problem with that count is that it was in 2010. Adil Riaz and colleagues report that these figures are likely to be dropping. One reason is agricultural intensification. They state that “tulip population has more than halved in abundance over 9 years between censuses”. On top of that there’s another problem, climate change which leads to the other limit on observations.

Tulipa cypria has a narrow flowering window. It’s said to flower in March and April, but the only observations on iNaturalist are in March. The trigger for flowering is to be found in the soil temperatures. However, to prime this trigger the bulb first has to chill.

There are mountains on Cyprus, so in the future as the climate warms it’s possible that tulips could be found higher than they are now. But this relies on them finding suitable habitat, which isn’t certain, and there’s only so much up they’ll be able to find.

Cover image: Tulipa cypria by martind / iNaturalist CC BY-NC