No, because the tulips of the 17th century were diseased, and the disease they carried caused them to "break" into colours that were more remarkable and vivid than those displayed by contemporary tulips.

It is impossible to comprehend the tulip mania without understanding just how different tulip cultivars were from every other flower known to horticulturists in the seventeenth century. The colours they exhibited were more intense, more concentrated that those of ordinary plants; mere red became bright scarlet, dull purple a bewitching shade of almost-black. They were also brilliantly defined, quite unlike the indefinite flushing displayed by other multi-coloured flowers as their petals shaded gradually from one colour to another. Many modern varieties of tulip have been deliberately bred to resemble broken tulips as closely as possible, but they're not quite the same thing.

The distinguishing colours of Dutch tulip cultivars – the reds of what were called Rosen tulips or the purples of the varieties called Violetten – generally appeared as feathers or flames which ran up the centre of each petal and sometimes also formed a border around its edges. These colours occasionally also appeared as mottled patches on the plant’s stem, though they never tainted the purity of the flower’s base, which was always either white (sometimes tinged with blue) or yellow, depending upon the variety. The patterns were unique to each flower, and though two plants of the same variety might closely resemble each other, they were never absolutely identical.

From the earliest days of the bulb craze, Dutch tulipophiles used the subtle variations of these flames and flares of colour to grade their flowers according to a strict set of criteria. The most highly prized tulips, termed ‘superbly fine’, were broken varieties which were almost entirely white or yellow in colour, displaying their flames of violet, red or brown only in thin stripes which ran along the centre and the edges of their petals. Flowers which in the opinion of the connoisseurs flaunted their bright colours too wantonly were termed ‘rude’ and were much less cherished by the connoisseurs.

Botanical (meaning wild) tulips are noted for their robust and simple colour schemes, so how did the celebrated cultivars (tulips bred by human growers) of the Dutch Golden Age become so elaborately coloured? The great irony of the tulip mania is that the most popular varieties, the ones which changed hands for hundreds or even thousands of guilders, were actually infected with a virus, one apparently unique to tulips. It was this which caused both the spectacular intensity and the variations in the colours of their petals and explained why tulips, alone among the flowers of the garden, displayed the distinct, intense and brilliant colours that collectors came to crave.

Even in early 1600s, it was obvious that something strange was happening to the tulips grown in Leiden and elsewhere. A bulb which one year had produced a unicoloured tulip might become a Rosen or a Bizarden the next. This process was known as ‘breaking’, and the bulb of a flower which had undergone the process was said to be ‘broken’ while those which remained unicoloured were called ‘breeders’. The whole process was extremely unpredictable. There was no way of telling if or when a flower would break; one tulip might bloom in the spring with a dazzling new array of colours, while another, of the same variety and planted next to the first in the same flower bed, remained quite unaffected. Breaking was common in some years, less so in others. Similarly, a broken bulb might – albeit rarely – produce an offset which turned out to be a breeder, and no grower could be sure that a breeder bulb would not break. The only certainties seemed to be that tulips grown from seed were invariably breeders, and that, once broken, a mother bulb would never again produce a unicoloured flower.

There were clues here to the nature of the disease, and Carolus Clusius, who ran the botanical gardens at the University of Leiden, was a careful enough observer to notice that broken tulips were slightly smaller and definitely weaker than the flowers produced by breeder bulbs. But at a time when the mechanisms by which diseases are communicated remained unguessed-at, the phenomenon of breaking seemed akin to magic to most of his contemporaries. Try as they might, growers could not force a breeder bulb to break when they wanted it to. Some turned to alchemical potions made of pigeon dung, which they applied to the bulbs; others tried cutting the bulbs of two different-coloured tulips in two and binding the opposing halves together in the hope of producing a flower sporting both colours. These devices rarely had the desired effect.

Exactly when the tulip became infected with a virus is not certain. The earliest observations of the phenomenon date to about 1580, but the disease was probably older than that. In truth the plant became vulnerable to disease as soon as it entered a garden; any flowers raised in artificial proximity by man face threats they do not encounter in the wild. Cultivars may be poorly cared-for or discarded in favour of some new favourite, but, in particular, they can pick up diseases to which the more robust botanical species have developed an immunity, or which at least spread more slowly in the wild.

The mystery of breaking remained unsolved until well into the twentieth century, when the agent which causes the disease, which is sometimes called the mosaic virus, was finally identified by staff at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London. By permitting aphids to feed on broken bulbs and then on breeders, they were able to show that the breeder bulbs visited by the aphids broke twice as often a control sample – thus simultaneously proving that the disease was caused by a virus and demonstrating the mechanism whereby it was transmitted from one tulip to another. Further experimentation showed that the mosaic virus could infect a both flower when it was growing in a garden, and a bulb which was being stored prior to planting. Perhaps ironically, given the efforts of old Dutch growers to induce breaking by binding half-bulbs together, the method used at the John Innes Institute to persuade aphids to feed alternately on infected and uninfected tulips was to graft halves of broken bulbs onto breeders.