Wildflowers of Turkey, Volume I: Bulbous Plants
By Yasemin Konuralp ·
Yasemin Konuralp published her first field guide in April 2013. It is a guide, and it is also an argument about collecting.
Turkey holds 11,466 recorded plant species, and 3,649 of them grow nowhere else on earth. That endemism is what makes the flora worth travelling for, and it is also what makes it fragile: a species confined to one mountain can be collected out of existence in a decade.
What the bulb trade took
At its height the export trade shipped more than seventy-one million wild bulbs in a single year: eleven million winter aconites, ten million Grecian windflowers, thirty million snowdrops. They were dug from the hillsides of Anatolia, and some species have not come back.
What worked
Not prohibition on its own. What has brought colonies back, Galanthus elwesii among them, is propagation: growing the bulbs in gardens and nurseries so that the wild populations stop being the supply. Botanists and naturalists made that case for years before it took.
The guide came out of three decades of walking these hills with a camera. If you would like it as the spine of a journey rather than a shelf, the botanical tours are built around the bloom, and around the archaeology that shares the same valleys.
