The Tulip Read online

  Dedicated to Valerie Finnis

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I A Flower of the East

  Chapter II The Tulip in Northern Europe

  Chapter III Early British Growers

  Chapter IV The Dutch and Tulipomania

  Chapter V Dutch Dominance

  Chapter VI The English Florists’ Tulip

  Chapter VII The Last Hundred Years

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology of Tulips

  Image Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Publisher’s Note

  Introduction

  The most interesting things in life often happen by accident. That is how I found myself one May sitting outside a taverna at Alíkampos in the western half of Crete, with no guide book, no decent map, but an excellent collection of wild-flower books. I spoke little Greek and the village elders solemnly ranged around the table – high leather boots, thorn walking sticks, moustaches luxuriant enough to hide a family of mice – spoke even less English. Small cups of coffee, tots of lethal, white, homemade brandy and dishes of salted marrow seeds piled up around us as the books were passed around from hand to hand, all open at the picture of the same flower. It was Tulipa bakeri, named after the man, George Percival Baker, who first exhibited it at a Royal Horticultural Society show in 1895.

  It is not a particularly showy flower, compared with the wild, seductive, flamboyant tulips of the Crimea and Central Asia. The Cretan tulip is mauve-purple, with a pronounced and well-defined yellow blotch at its base. The backs of the petals are washed over with a faintly green flush, the overlay which gives so many tulips the texture of the finest, most luscious satin. But for some reason, I’d set my heart on finding it and Crete was its only known habitat. Intermittently, the Alíkampos elders set my flower books in front of me, opened at photographs of dragon arums, asphodels, and grape hyacinths. These, they indicated, they could show me by the hundred. But no one knew the tulip. More brandy was brought on to compensate for the disappointment.

  Then, after a rapid exchange in Greek, one of the elders and a small boy beckoned me over to the hired car that I had parked nearby. I thought that they might need a lift, so we set off down the hairpin bends of the no-through road that leads to this hill-top village. Obeying violent hand signals from the old man, we bumped down a track off the road, parked, walked further down the hill and arrived suddenly at a small whitewashed building, no more than twelve feet by ten feet, standing by a spring.

  The old man unlocked the door and, with a magician’s flourish, threw it open. It was a church of course, though I didn’t know that until I stepped inside and saw the grave, elongated faces of a whole lexicon of saints staring out with pitted eyes from wall and ceiling. Eighth century, said the man, tracing the figures with the end of a beeswax candle. Byzantine. He lit the candle and I peered slowly round at the ancient saints, the dark ochre colours of the paintings disappearing and then coming to light again as the candle flame bent and flickered. It was a weird moment: expecting tulips and finding frescoes instead.

  Indirectly, the saints led to the tulip, for the small boy, left outside sitting on a rock, had hijacked a passer-by and showed him the picture of the flower that I was looking for. ‘Omalós,’ he said triumphantly as we emerged. ‘Omalós,’ he said again, pointing at the picture and then somewhere to the west, way over the horizon. The next day I drove myself to Omalós, along narrow roads lined with clouds of blue scabious and heads of wild oats and barley. The backdrop was gargantuan: stony mountain peaks with thick flanks of snow.

  Omalós is a bleak town set high on a pancake plain, imprisoned between walls of mountain. The plain was nibbled bare by sheep. It was so quiet that you could hear the seed pods of the wild spurges popping in the heat. I quartered the ground like a blood hound, cheered at finding anemones in all colours, the wild forebears of the florist’s ‘De Caen’. It seemed likely that where there were anemones, there might also be tulips.

  Without realising how much ground I had covered, I found after an hour or so that I was almost halfway up the mountain. The snow-line was clearly visible. I wanted to touch the snow and the track was easy. I calculated that it would take no more than a hour of climbing to get there. When I reached the snow, I found crocus on its melting edges. Even higher were flat, rock-hugging mats of an alpine anchusa, the flowers dazzling blue amongst the leaves. But no tulips.

  At the top, I threw a snowball at an eagle before beginning a descent very much more rapid than the upward climb had been. Then, as I mooched back to the car, Tulipa bakeri suddenly sprang into view. I thought it was a mirage, but no. While I had been flailing up the ‘because-it’s-there’ route, they had been flowering in an area mercifully fenced off from grazing animals, on the old olive terraces of the Omalós plain. They were growing in thin, poor grassland, their shiny leaves poking out from sheaves of anemones, with orchids thrown in for good measure, as well as the strange pale-green-and-black flowers of Hermodactylus tuberosus. I gazed at them in respectful – no, more than that – in reverent silence. I could find nothing suitable to say. This was the first time I had seen tulips growing in the wild. I knew how Galahad must have felt when he finally caught up with the Grail.

  At this moment, I happily recognised an obsession that had been creeping up on me for some time. I suppose there must be one or two people in the world who choose not to like tulips, but such an aberration is scarcely credible. Who could resist T. eichleri from northern Iran, with its brilliant crimson-scarlet flowers, the petals nipping in slightly at the waist to finish in sharp needle points? The backs of the outer petals are washed over in greeny-buff, so in bud it looks very sober. Then it flings open its petals and reveals itself as the wildly sexy flower that it is. Who could not fall in love with the Cottage tulip ‘Magier’ as it opens its buds in May? The petals are a soft milky-white splashed with purple around the edges. As the flower ages, which it does gracefully and well (a worthwhile attribute) the whole thing darkens and purple leaches out from the edges through the entire surface of the petals. It is a mesmerising performance.

  But as in any love affair, after the initial coup de foudre you want to learn more about the object of your passion. The tulip does not disappoint. Its background is full of more mysteries, dramas, dilemmas, disasters and triumphs than any besotted aficionado could reasonably expect. In the wild, it is an Eastern flower, growing along a corridor which stretches either side of the line of latitude 40 degrees north. The line extends from Ankara in Turkey eastwards through Jerevan and Baku to Turkmenistan, then on past Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent to the mountains of the Pamir-Alai, which, with neighbouring Tien Shan is the hotbed of the tulip family.

  As far as western Europe is concerned, the tulip’s story began in Turkey, from where in the mid sixteenth century, European travellers brought back news of the brilliant and until then unknown lils rouges, so prized by the Turks. In fact they were not lilies at all but tulips. In April 1559, the Zürich physician and botanist Conrad Gesner saw the tulip flowering for the first time in the splendid garden made by Johannis Heinrich Herwart of Augsburg, Bavaria. He described its gleaming red petals and its sensuous scent in a book published two years later, the first known report of the flower growing in western Europe. The tulip, wrote Gesner, had ‘sprung from a seed which had come from Constantinople or as others say from Cappadocia’. From that flower and from its wild cousins, gathered over the next 300 years from the steppes of Siberia, from Afghanistan, Chitral, Beirut and the Marmaris peninsula, from Isfahan, the Crimea and the Caucasus, came the cultivars which have been grown in gardens ever since. More than 5,500 different tulips are listed in the Inte
rnational Register published regularly since 1929 by the Royal General Bulbgrowers’ Association in the Netherlands.

  Holland was the setting for one of the strangest episodes in the long, mesmerising story of the tulip. The ‘Tulipomania’ that raged in Holland between 1634 and 1637 has puzzled historians and economists every since. How could it have ever happened that single bulbs of certain kinds of tulips could change hands for sums that would have secured a town house in the best quarter of Amsterdam? How was it possible that at the height of the tulip fever, a bulb of ‘Admiral van Enkhuijsen’ weighing 215 azen, could sell for 5,400 guilders, the equivalent of fifteen years’ wages for the average Amsterdam bricklayer?1

  Certain facts are brought forward to support less certain theories. The setting-up of the Dutch East India Company in 1602 and Amsterdam’s increasing importance as a port, marked the beginning of an era of great prosperity for the Dutch. Merchants became rich, and in their wake, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists and jewellers did too. Adriaen Pauw, Lord of Heemstede, Keeper of the Great Seal of Holland and envoy of the States General to various foreign courts, was one of the directors of the new East India Company. His house, which was just outside Haarlem, stood in magnificent gardens where tulips grew clustered around a mirrored gazebo. The mirrors gave the illusion that the hundreds of blooms were thousands, for even Adriaen Pauw could not afford to plant thousands of tulips. For rich merchants, fountains, aviaries of rare birds and temples in the Greek style were standard accoutrements of the garden. But the tulip was the ultimate status symbol, the definitive emblem of how much you were worth. In the 1980s, the City trader’s Porsche performed the same function, though in a cruder way. Among the many rare tulips in Pauw’s garden was the entire known stock of ‘Semper Augustus’, the most beautifully marked of all the red and white striped tulips of the early seventeenth century. By the 1640s, when tulipomania was officially over, there were thought to be only twelve bulbs of ‘Semper Augustus’ still in existence, priced at 1,200 guilders each. This was the equivalent of three times the average annual wage in mid seventeenth-century Holland, perhaps £80,000 in modern-day terms.

  If you could not afford the flowers themselves, you commissioned an artist such as Ambrosius Bosschaert or Balthasar van der Ast to paint tulips for you. Even the grand master of Dutch flower painting, Jan van Huysum, could rarely command more than 5,000 guilders for a painting. But a single bulb of the tulip ‘Admiral Liefkens’ changed hands for 4,400 guilders at an auction in Alkmaar on 5 February 1637, while ‘Admiral van Enkhuijsen’ was even more expensive at 5,400 guilders. The last of the big spenders bid at this auction of tulip bulbs: ninety-nine lots which realised 90,000 guilders, perhaps as much as £6 million in today’s money. Because the sale was held in February, while the bulbs were still in the ground, each was sold by its weight at planting time, the weights recorded in azen. Offsets carry the same characteristics as their parents. That is why they were valuable. They were the equivalent of the interest earned on the capital invested in the bulb. Tulip seed, by comparison, usually produces a wide number of variations on the theme of the parent bulb.

  Selling tulip bulbs by weight seemed sensible but the system contained the germs of its own destruction. Once the concept of the azen had taken hold, these azens could be traded on their own account, without the bulbs actually changing hands at all. The azens took on a ‘futures’ life of their own and the tulip itself in Zbigniew Herbert’s words, ‘grew pale, lost its colours and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money’.2 For this, tradesmen mortgaged their houses, weavers their looms. Many were bankrupted. Innkeepers flourished, for it was in the inns that most trading took place and the drietje or wine money was an integral part of each tulip deal.

  In the end, there is no way to explain why tulip fever affected the solid, respectable burghers of Holland in such an aberrant way. They were possessed, obsessed by this flower with its intoxicating aura of the infidels who, as recently as 1529, had been battering at the gates of Vienna. And the flower itself had a unique trick which added dangerously to its other attractions. It could change colour, seemingly at will. A plain-coloured flower such as Councillor Herwart’s red tulip, might emerge the following spring in a completely different guise, the petals feathered and flamed in intricate patterns of white and deep red. Seventeenth-century tulip lovers could not know that these ‘breaks’ were caused by a virus which was spread by aphids for the research that provided the answer to a mystery that had intrigued and ensnared tulip growers for centuries was only carried out in the late 1920s. Connoisseurs throughout Europe (and in the Ottoman Empire) had always rated ‘broken’ flowers more highly than plain-coloured ones. For that reason, the broken flowers were the ones that commanded outrageous prices. But out of a batch of a hundred tulips only one or two would turn their coats each year and emerge the following season with highly desirable ‘feathered’ or ‘flamed’ flowers. As all the bulbs received exactly the same treatment, no grower could fathom the reasons for these differences. Each broken flower, each superbly complex pattern was as original as a fingerprint. The virus was the joker in the tulip bed. Since its cause was for so long not known, its effects could not be controlled. Fortunately, once a bulb had broken, it remained broken and the offsets produced by the bulb carried the same characteristics. But the virus had the effect of weakening the tulip, so offsets were not produced so freely and vigorously as might be the case with a virus-free bulb. Consequently, fine broken varieties such as ‘Semper Augustus’ were slow to increase, and that in turn increased their value.

  The virus works by partly suppressing the laid-on colour of a tulip, its anthocyanin, leaving the underlying colour, always white or yellow, to show through. The contrasting red or purple of a broken tulip looks as though it has been painted on the petals with a fine camel-hair brush. Sometimes the feathered and flamed markings make symmetrical patterns and these were always highly prized by tulip fanciers. The contrasting colours of a broken tulip are always sharply defined, the effect quite distinct from the indeterminate flushes of different colours displayed on the backs of tulips such as ‘Prinses Irene’ or the pink and white species, T. clusiana, the Lady Tulip. The base of a broken tulip always remains pure white or yellow. The contrast between the purity of the base and the patterned petals was an important criterion of excellence among the florists who, from the middle of the seventeenth century, cultivated the tulip as one of six florists’ flowers, shown in keenly contested competition.

  Deeply intrigued by the process of breaking and spurred on, no doubt, by the thought of the vast sums of money to be netted from a good break, early growers noted the characteristic effects of the virus on the tulip – the mottled leaves, the smaller flower, the reduced vigour of the plant – without ever being in a position to relate effects to cause.

  The very word ‘virus’ was not understood in the modern sense3 until the 1880s. Only the advent of the electron microscope in the late 1920s gave researchers the necessary means to unravel its true nature. Aided just by the evidence of their own enquiring eyes, early growers had a thousand theories about the best way to bring about the magic break. Some charlatans sold miracle recipes for the purpose at a guinea a time. Some fools bought them. Pigeon dung was a favourite catalyst, as was plaster from old walls, and water that ran from dung hills. Some growers, taking their cue from contemporary alchemists, laid the desired colours in powdered paint on their tulip beds, expecting the colours somehow miraculously to transmute the flowers. It was no stranger than the alchemists’ own attempts to turn base metal into gold. Indeed it was rather better, for while the alchemists consistently failed in their endeavours, it seemed that the tulip growers occasionally succeeded. They just did not know why.

  Some old tulip growers tried cutting the bulbs of red-flowered tulips in half and binding them together with halves of bulbs of white-flowered tulips, hoping that a red and white striped tulip would result. It sounds crude, laughab
le even, but it was exactly by this means that the process of breaking was finally unravelled. It happened in 1928 when Dorothy Cayley (1874–1955), a mycologist at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in Merton, on the outskirts of London, grafted halves of tulip bulbs known to be ‘broken’ on to halves of the cochineal-red, Single Late tulip ‘Bartigon’ which were known to be unbroken. More than a quarter of the resulting flowers broke within the first year, a far higher proportion than in the control group. Earlier experiments on tulips at the John Innes Institute had been carried out by the botanist Dr E J Collins (1877–1939), who had suspected that aphids were the vectors, the carriers of the virus from bulb to bulb. He encouraged his pet aphids to gorge first on broken bulbs and then on bulbs that were presumed to be free of virus. Unfortunately, his experiments were inconclusive because the so-called clean bulbs of the control group actually contained tulips that were already broken. But the deliberately infected bulbs did break over the next three years at twice the normal rate. The aphid in question, the most effective one at least, was Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid, which flourishes in warm situations surrounded by an abundance of fruit trees. Fruit trees in abundance were an outstanding feature of seventeenth-century gardens, and peach trees were particularly prevalent in the Eastern countries in which the tulip had its home. Although those early, observant gardeners realised that shifting their tulips into fresh soil often caused them to break more abundantly, none of them made the connection between the broken flowers, the fruit tree and its helpful, virus-inducing aphid.

  The virus that affects the tulip is the only known instance of a plant disease which hugely increases the value of the infected plant. Since the turn of the century, however, when the single-coloured, mass-market Darwin tulips began to dominate the scene, breeders have done all they can to prevent breaking. The tulip, prized and cherished through more than 300 years as a jewel flower, refined and exquisite, revered for its individual intricacy, was redefined as brightly coloured wallpaper. Fortunately, it knows how to rebel. The joker still lurks in the tulip bed.