Where did tulip originally, grow?

Botanical gardens and arboreta once wielded enormous influence in the world. Until our day, plants were practically the only source of drugs, and, as a result, professors of medicine like Gesner were also botanists who used university gardens under their supervision for the training of medical students.
    Medicines were not the only product of these gardens. Some botanists also made it a practice to cultivate, disseminate, and study exotic plants received from explorers around the world, and many of these plants later assumed enormous economic importance. The tulip, now considered the typical flower of Holland and one of its chief exports, was introduced to the botanical gardens from the Near East, in the sixteenth century.
    Natural rubber is one of the most spectacular examples of the influence that botanical gardens can exert on the fate of an industry and of a region. The tree Hevea Brasilienses grows naturally in several parts of the Amazonian valley, and the rubber obtained from it was shipped to the industrial nations through the Brazilian port of Manaus. Although Manaus lies in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest, the rubber trade was so intense between 1890 and 1920 this relatively small city became one of the richest and most developed in the world. It was the first Latin American city to have electric light. Majestic buildings and homes, churches and cathedrals and a complex system of sewers and floating docks were built there nearly overnight.
    In the meantime, English botanists learned to cultivate H. Brazilienses in greenhouses and began distributing seeds and seedlings to several Southeast Asian countries. Plantation rubber was so readily produced in Malaysia that large quantities of it could be exported as early as 1910. Shortly after, it completely displaced the natural rubber of Brazil and Manaus became a ghost town.
    Today, directors of botanical gardens and arboreta no longer engage in activities so economically urgent as the preparation of medical drugs, the propagation of tulips, and the transfer of hevea trees from one tropical Country to another were in their times. In our era, their contributions could never make or break the fate of cities or countries. These days, the gardens simply try to appeal to the general public by displaying plant species under attractive conditions at suitable times of year.
    While these traditional contributions to science and to the public are important—and deserve appreciation—botanical gardens and arboreta could serve an even more essential purpose by involving themselves more directly in solving certain contemporary problems, a task for which they have unique qualifications. Indeed, they could yet become as vital to the world as they were in the time of Gesner, or in the heyday of Manaus.
    There are clear signs that several botanical gardens and arboreta have already begun to evolve in this way. At the Kew Gardens, for example, the emphasis has long been on the collection of wild plant species and on taxonomy. But the new director of Kew, Arthur Bell, is a biochemist who has stated that one of his main concerns will be to use the garden’s facilities for improving patterns of agriculture, in developing countries.
    There are many other fields of endeavor for the new botany, and one of the most urgent is the study of injured ecosystems. In most cases, however, damaged ecosystems will require more direct human intervention for their successful recovery. This is already happening in Israel; but the reclamation of strip-mined areas in this country will certainly present problems of greater complexity and magnitude.
    Moreover, it is probably a mistake to assume, as many do, that the "best" environment is an untouched stretch of virgin land and that reclaiming a wasteland necessarily means returning it to its original state. Practically all existing ecosystems that humans find desirable were produced by profound transformations of nature or even by the creation of entirely artificial ecosystems. The eighteenth-century English naturalist William Marshall believed "Nature knows nothing of what we call landscape because this word refers to habitats manipulated by human beings for their own purpose...No spot on this island (England) can be said to be in a state of Nature. There is not a tree, perhaps not a bush, now standing on the face of the country which owes its identical state to Nature alone. Wherever cultivation has set its foot, Nature has become extinct...Those who wish for a Nature in a state of total neglect must take their residence in the woods of America".
    In the past, artificial ecosystems like lamas, estates, and villages evolved over long periods of time, and this stow development enhanced their chances of success by allowing for the play of corrective forces—natural and human—that are the corrective forces that enhanced the chances of success of the evolution and thus for the satisfactory orchestration of their different components. As human intervention becomes increasingly rapid and violent, the trial and error of the past must be replaced by scientific knowledge. For instance, studies are needed to determine the amount of energy required for maintaining the ecological stability of artificial ecosystems.