Before New York was New York, it was New Netherlands. The Dutch established New Amsterdam, the provincial capital, at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1624. New Amsterdam gave way to New York when the English took it over in 1664, not long after "tulip mania" had arrived and then collapsed in the Netherlands.
Red and yellow tulip, Green-Wood Cemetery, May 5, 2022
Yellow tulips near the Boathouse, Central Park
Purple tulip, Green-Wood Cemetery
All this history came to mind this spring when I photographed and filmed the glorious tulips in Central Park, on Cross Bay Boulevard, and in Green-Wood Cemetery in New York City in April and May. The first day I began to videotape the tulips in Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, the wind was blowing the tulips in magical ways. The gardeners this year created beds of multicolored hybrids, which I documented in a video, “Tulips in the Wind.” The music, by Chopin, is exquisitely performed by Olga Gurevich (obtained from MusOpen.org, a royalty-free music source).
I took hundreds of photos of the tulips, and I offer them here. They were taken April 16 through May 12. There were times looking at these photos that I thought I was experiencing my own tulip mania, and I imagined I was at Keukenhof.
The photos in the groupings below were included in the video.
