I went to the Plain of Omalos at the beginning of my tulip hunt with the specific intention of finding Tulipa bakeri, which was named after George Percival Baker who first showed it at the Horticultural Society in London in 1895. I'd never seen a tulip growing in the wild before.

I went with my husband on the advice of a botanist friend in London who had once seen Tulipa bakeri growing there.

We hired a car and drove furiously up to Omalos, where I quartered the plain like a bloodhound. I had spent about three hours looking for it and getting crosser and crosser, but I just could not find one. Eventually, I reached the top of the mountain, way beyond the point where any sensible tulip would be growing, threw a snowball at an eagle and then realised there was nothing for me to do but go down again.

I rushed back down the mountain in a lunatic fashion because I was so upset at not finding this tulip and found my husband sitting on a rock in the sun, eating our picnic and reading. He sat up, pointed to his feet and said: "Is that what you are looking for?"

I could not believe how unfair it was. Here was a man who would not know a tulip from a tiger lily, and this flower had chosen to reveal itself to him. But it was an important lesson because it showed me that you cannot track down tulips like a hunter. They choose the time and place to reveal themselves and demand that you be a humble acolyte.

Once I got over my fury, I sat and felt like Galahad after finding the Holy Grail. I spent the rest of the day just looking at it, sitting there and trying to imprint it on my memory. I took one photograph for reference but, more importantly, I let the image of Tulipa bakeri soak into my mind.

The Plain of Omalos is very flat and ringed round with mountains, a strange, barren place with grey hills grazed practically bare by vast herds of sheep and goats. We stayed in a tiny cottage in the middle of nowhere, about 20 minutes walk into the village.

I loved the cragginess of the interior of Crete and its toughness. Later on in the summer, it probably gets very barren, but in April and May, when all the bulbs were coming out, it was a terrific place for walking. It was also wonderful not being tied to the beach and being able to do things that our children would hate.

• The Tulip by Anna Pavord is published in paperback by Bloomsbury at £8.99