"As far as western Europe is concerned, the 's story began in Turkey, from where in the sixteenth century, European travellers brought back news of the brilliant and until then unknown lils rouges, so prized by the Turks. In fact there were not lilies at all but tulips. In April 1559, the Zürich physician and botanist saw the tulip flowering for the first time in the splendid garden made by Johannes Heinrich Herwart of , . He described its gleaming red petals and its sensuous scent in a book published two years later, the first known report of the flower growing in western Europe. The tulip, wrote Gesner, had 'sprung from a seed which had come from or as others say from '. From that flower and from its wild cousins, gathered over the next 300 years from the steppes of Siberia, from Afghanistan, Chitral, and the , from Isfahan, the Crimea and the , came the s which have been grown in gardens ever since. More than 5,500 different tulips are listed in the International Register published regularly since 1929 by the in the Netherlands."