Though the tulip originally comes from Asia Minor and Central Asia, there is hardly a more Dutch icon to be found. It was Carolus Clusius, prefect of Leyden Hortus Botanicus, who planted the first bulbs in The Netherlands of the sixteenth century. However, it was young headmaster Pieter Boschman of Limmen, North-Holland, who started collecting historical tulip cultivars, some dating from the Golden Age