I Am Not Alone

I am afraid of tulips...

For as long as I can remember, I have really hated tulips. It isn't that I find them ugly (though I do) it is more that they make me very uncomfortable, scared even. To be near them upsets me. I try to leave the city during The Tulip Festival and hate walking along the canal when there are lots of them around. I don't know what it really is that bothers me, the stamen inside (and once the leaves fall off it is all that is left) mainly, or the thick waxy petals... This is so crazy. I would be more embarrassed except I have a friend who is scared of loose strands of wet hair, which also seems strange. My mother is afraid of spiders, actually I know a lot of people who are but I don't really have any problem with them. Most fears are strange. Mine is just particularly peculiar and rare, until today I had never heard of anyone else with it.

A quick google search turned up the following on blogs, articles, and forums...
"I have an irrational fear of tulips. When I was a young child I naively peered up at these seemingly beautiful flowers and sniffed them, only to be confronted with these hideous black things which I thought were a giant bugs. Yeh, so have been scared of tulips since the age of 4 although the fear is dying now, which has to be a good thing, it's a very hard phobia to explain."
and
"I had a terrible and sickening fear of tulips that began when I was five. I am mostly over it now."
and
"Something about the black stamens in the middle is just wrong... My mom had big yellow ones when I was a kid - taller than I was - and I thought they were a cross between tigers and bees and would sting me and bite me and kidnap me. I wasn't scared they would kill me, though - didn't know about death yet. I'm not as terrified of them as I was then - I think to be a proper, official phobia it has to be mind-bogglingly awful and interfere with one's daily life. Not that I don't avoid tulips - nothing could induce me to plant one. And walking past a bed of them is creepy as anything - thinking about it makes my skin crawl."
and
"I had a tulip phobia when I was very small. I remember it very well, and what caused it. I was strongly attracted to the brilliant red of the tulip, but when I reached out to look inside that cup-like flower, I saw the black pistils and stamens in the center of the 'cup'. They resembled hairy insects and I was surprised and afraid they would crawl out onto my hand."
and
This great post by Peter Harlaub on The Poop: The Chronicle Baby Blog

So I am not alone! I think the scientific name for it would be tulipaphobia, seeing that Tulipa is the genus (which has 109 species, Oh God!!).