About This Stamp
Each fall, millions of gardeners bury bulbs in the earth, eagerly anticipating the rewards that springtime will bring. Months later, thick green leaves poke through the soil, soon revealing their payload: tulip blossoms in spectacular variety from prim to ostentatious. These stamps from the U.S. Postal Service feature closeup views of 10 different tulips in a rainbow of colors.
A member of the lily family (Lilliaceae), the tulip (genus Tulipa) originated as a wildflower in Central Asia. There, despite the dry, rocky environment, these tulip ancestors were able to survive because they could draw nourishment from the bulb. Over time, traders carried them west along the Silk Route to Persia, where cultivation of them is thought to have begun in the 10th century. By the 16th century, tulips were all the rage in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). The name “tulip,” in fact, derives from a Turkish version of the Persian word for “turban,” an allusion to the flower’s shape.
After diplomats in Constantinople shipped bulbs home to western Europe, the Dutch developed effective ways to cultivate and market the flower. The tulip trade remains an important part of their nation’s economy 400 years later.
Dutch immigrants brought tulip bulbs to America, perhaps as early as the 1600s. The flower has become a dazzling part of the landscape here, and we now import more than one billion bulbs per year. Tulips can be grown in most of the country, outside of the Deep South, and gardeners can choose among almost endless varieties.
Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamps with existing photographs by Denise Ippolito.
Tulip Blossoms will be issued as Forever® stamps in booklets of 20, as well as coils of 3,000 and 10,000. These Forever stamps will always be equal to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Greg Breeding
Greg Breeding is a graphic designer and principal of Journey Group, a design company he co-founded in 1992, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was creative director until 2013, at which time he began serving as president and continued in that role through 2023.
Breeding’s fascination with modernism began while studying design at Virginia Commonwealth University. His affinity with the movement continues and motivates his ongoing advanced studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland most every summer.
As an art director for postage stamp design since 2012, Breeding has designed more than 100 stamps covering a diverse array of subjects, from Star Wars droids and Batman to Harlem Renaissance writers and the transcontinental railroad.
His work has been recognized in annual design competitions held by Graphis, AIGA, PRINT magazine, and Communication Arts.
Breeding lives in North Garden, Virginia, with his wife and enjoys nothing so much as frolicking on the floor with his grandchildren.
Existing Photographs By
Denise Ippolito
New Jersey-based Denise Ippolito is a full-time professional photographer, workshop leader, and artist. She travels extensively presenting slide lectures and seminars and teaching photography and Photoshop. Her workshops feature a variety of subjects, including avian, flower, landscape and creative photography.
Ippolito has won several awards for her work. In 2010, and again in 2014, she received a Highly Honored award in the prestigious Windland Smith Rice Nature's Best International Awards Competition. Also in 2014, one of her images was selected as part of the People's Choice Awards Top 50 Images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. In 2015 she won the Art in Nature category in the Nature's Best Competition, and the following year her image of a Moseley's rockhopper penguin was selected as the Birds category winner in the same competition. Her image “Snow Globe” was selected as the First Place Winged Life category winner for the 2017 BigPicture: Natural World Photography Competition.
Ippolito’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Nature’s Best Photography magazine, GEO magazine, and the 2018 book Wonders: Spectacular Moments in Nature Photography from the California Academy of Sciences, among other publications. Her images have hung in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and the San Diego Natural History Museum, and are featured in a 2011 Sierra Club documentary on the preservation of the Florida Everglades. More recently, Ippolito herself appeared in an episode of Xploration Awesome Planet for Fox Television.
Tulip Blossoms (2023) was Ippolito’s first stamp project for the U.S. Postal Service followed in 2025 with Dahlias.