The Tulip Read online

  Poor Freyn! In the long-drawn-out game of leap-frog between tulip and taxonomist, the tulip was always going to win. Its extraordinary diversity, its desire always to be trying on new clothes, is precisely what made it a source of wonder and delight to the gardeners who over hundreds of years gradually nursed it into shapes and shades that even the tulips themselves had not thought of. The family is still in a state of flux, but about 120 different species are thought to be spread over the Old World, three-quarters of them concentrated in Central Asia. In the New World, they did not exist until man took them there. From their hotbed, bounded by the Tien Shan and the Pamir-Alai mountain ranges, tulips spread northwards through mountains and steppes to the regions of Pribalkhash and Altai, halted eventually by the extreme cold of the Arctic. To the south, they moved in the direction of the Himalayas and Kashmir. Most extensive was their migration westwards, where they were no doubt helped on by merchants on the well-travelled trade routes which led from Central Asia into Europe. Tulips spread towards Syr-Dar’ya, the steppes of Karakum, the Hindu Kush and Turkmenistan, to Iranian Khorasan and then through northwest Iran to the Caucasus. From the Caucasus, migration continued westwards into the Balkans and from there to Italy, France, Spain and the Atlas Mountains of northwest Africa.

  As the tulip march had been halted to the north by cold, here it was stopped by the inhospitable heat of the desert. Desert met them too in Israel, where tulips had moved south from the Caucasus through Syria, Iraq and the Lebanon. Nineteenth-century travellers in Kashgaria and Dzungaria, the areas east of the heartland, reported seeing the same species here as in the Tien Shan. Some species also have been found in the Kiangsi, Hupeh and Shantung provinces of China. About fourteen different species grow in the mountains of Turkey, though only four of these, T. armena, T. biflora, T. humilis and T. julia are thought to be indigenous. When it had subjugated the Turks, the tulip jumped the Bosphorus and continued its slow journey to the west, travelling with traders, explorers, even in the diplomatic baggage of envoys such as Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, to reach gardens in Italy, Austria, Germany and Flanders by the middle of the sixteenth century.

  Before that, it seems to have been unknown outside its natural habitat. No tulips appear in the flower-strewn borders of the medieval manuscripts of Europe. When Hugo van der Goes (c1440–1482) painted his Portinari altar-piece, dark aquilegias, bright red lilies, blue and white iris and a scatter of violas were prominently displayed in the foreground, but there were no tulips. The botanist Conrad Gesner, describing in 1559 a red tulip growing in Councillor Herwart’s Augsburg garden, made clear that this was a grand event – as far as he was concerned, a first. But as far back as the thirteenth century, the tulip was being celebrated by Persian poets such as Musharrifu’d-din Sa’adi. In Gulistan he described his visionary garden where ‘The murmur of a cool stream / bird song, ripe fruit in plenty / bright multi-coloured tulips and fragrant roses…’ created a paradise on earth for its fortunate owner. ‘O cup bearer, serve us the wine soon, before the tulips wither,’ wrote another poet. ‘The flames in our fireplaces are the tulip gardens of winter.’ Tulips are commemorated in Turkish place names such as Laleli (place of the tulips) near Erzerum, and Laleli gecidi (tulip pass) between Kayseri and Sivas. There were grimmer references too. On St Vitus’ Day, 15 June 1389, the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Murad I fought the Serbian ruler Prince Lazar and his Bosnian allies at Kossovo Field, a high plateau sixty miles north of Skopje. A Turkish chronicler compared the battlefield, strewn with heads and turbans to a huge bed of tulips, the vivid yellow and red head-dresses mirroring the equally vivid and varied colours of the flowers.

  The tulip flourished spectacularly in the later Ottoman Empire, appearing as a motif on tiles, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, miniatures, headstones, prayer rugs and murals. But it does not appear at all on artefacts of the earlier Byzantine era. This is more likely to be because they did not value the tulip than because they were unfamiliar with it, though the anonymous writer of the Defter-i Lalezar-i Istanbul, the ‘Book of Tulip Gardens in Istanbul’, does say that before the Seljuk invasion of Baghdad in 1055 only one kind of tulip, the Sahra-i Lale, or meadow tulip, was known in Istanbul. They were certainly known to the Seljuks who from the eleventh century onwards migrated west from their tribal lands in Central and Northeast Asia through Iran, Mesopotamia, and Syria. In 1096, they captured Konya in Inner Anatolia and tiles decorated with tulips, made by Anatolian Seljuks, have been excavated from the Palace of Alaeddin Keykubad I on the shores of Lake Beyşehir.

  In the relatively settled period following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, tulips flourished in the gardens laid out by Sultan Mehmed II (1451–1481), who remade great tracts of the city. He built himself a palace, the Topkapi Saray, on one of Constantinople’s seven hills, and laid out pleasure gardens inside the city’s courtyards. Surplus flowers from the Sultan’s twelve gardens were regularly sold in the flower markets and eventually a staff of 920 gardeners was needed to maintain his orchards, kitchen gardens and vast pleasure grounds. In his Treatise on Husbandry1, Qasim ibn Yuruf Abu Nasri Haravi gave precise instructions for laying out such gardens. Water channels and pavilions, he wrote, should be enclosed within lines of poplars. For each bed in the pleasure garden, Qasim suggested different flowers: colchicums with violets, roses with narcissus and saffron crocus, Persian lilac with tulips and mauve stocks. The beds nearest the house were often filled with roses, sacred in Islam as the flower which sprang from Mohammed’s sweat.

  In this culture, only particular flowers were valued: hyacinths, roses, jonquils, irises, carnations, and of course, tulips. Derived from the Persian, the Turkish word for tulip – lale – was written with the same Arabic letters as were used for the name of Allah, so the flower was often used as a religious symbol. Carved as a decorative device on buildings or fountains, it was the immediately recognisable emblem of the ruling House of Osman. Early manuscripts make it clear though that the different types of tulips in gardens ‘occurred’ rather than being specifically bred, as happened under later Ottoman emperors. As Victorian fern fans enthusiastically collected from the wild strangely aberrant forms of hart’s-tongues and lady ferns with crinkled edges and tasselled ends, so curiosities in the enormous family of tulips must have been collected from the wild and brought into cultivation in Ottoman gardens. The historian Hodja Hasan Efendi, who accompanied Sultan Murad IV on his Eastern expedition, brought seven kinds of tulip back from Persia to raise in his garden in Istanbul.

  Under Süleyman the Magnificent (c1495–1566), the Ottoman Empire reached its apogee, the zenith of its political and military power. It stretched from the Crimea to Egypt and covered a large part of the Balkans. Ottoman dynasties ruled in Bukhara and Samarkand and the warrior-gardener Mohammed Babur took control of Afghanistan and India. Wherever Babur went on his restless pilgrimage through Asia, he made gardens linked by a common Islamic tradition, derived ultimately from Persia. This tradition determined the kinds of plants he put in his gardens and Babur’s own journal2 lists the trees and flowers he particularly favoured. He liked fruit trees of all kinds, poplar, willow, jasmine, narcissus, violets and tulips. Before he died in 1530, he visited the tulip fields around Samarkand, having already planted tulips in all the gardens he had made in Turkey and India. Miniatures painted in the Beyan-i Menazil-i Sefer-i Irakeyn by Matrakci Nasuh3 illustrate the places that his victorious armies passed through on their campaigns. One reveals tulips, growing in the wild near Konya. Another shows the tulip growing as a cultivated flower in a convent garden at Seyitgazi near Eskişehir.

  From the sixteenth century onwards, the tulip became an integral part of Ottoman culture, universally employed as an ornamental motif. They were embroidered in rows on Süleyman the Magnificent’s gowns of cream satin brocade. Even his armoured champron bears the emblem of a tulip, embossed on the gilded metal. Tulips also featured prominently on the pottery and particularly the tiles of the period, which are such a spectacular feature
of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and the upper galleries of the city’s mosques. The designs reflected the way that these tiles were often used in Ottoman buildings to cover entire walls4 and were often built up from groups of four tiles, each with a quarter of the central motif printed in one corner. Tulips first appeared on Iznik ceramics between about 1535 and 1540; sometimes the flowers were shown as though they were growing in a garden, sometimes as single blooms displayed in small vases. European travellers had already noted this particularly Turkish custom: to present a single, perfect bloom in a narrow-necked container or laledan. The earliest tiles were decorated with simple blue and turquoise glazes, but later, sage green, an opaque yellow and violet were added to the palette. The superb, singing red that could have been created especially for the tulip, appears around 1560, but lasted only until the end of the century.5

  The nakkasan (designers, painters, decorators, illuminators) of the imperial studios had a great influence on the work of other artists and craftsmen in the capital. As their designs spread, a new national style was established, different and separate from Persian-based art. Tulips bloomed everywhere, painted with the same three confident brush strokes to create an elegant, waisted flower with petals that flipped out at the top. These tulips are altogether more comfortable, rounded creatures than the etiolated, starved flowers preferred under the later reign of Sultan Ahmed III. Sometimes they are painted in the entirely appropriate bolered colour that distinguishes pottery of this period. But just as often, they appear bright blue, one of the few stunts that the real tulip cannot perform. A similar, strange blue was used by European artists such as Joris Hoefnagel, who produced the first paintings of the tulip in Europe at much the same time as the Iznik ware was being made. The tulips that appear on Iznik plates and tiles, tankards and jugs are most often underglazed in a single colour. Sometimes though, the potters painted the petals with stippled designs in contrasting colours. Were they perhaps copying the broken tulips that florists came to admire so extravagantly?

  The French traveller and botanist, Pierre Belon, who was in Turkey and the Levant for three years from 1546, wrote admiringly of Turkish gardens, saying that there were ‘no people who delight more to ornament themselves with beautiful flowers, nor who praise them more than the Turks’. The English traveller, George Sandys (1578–1644), youngest son of the Archbishop of York, was more dyspeptic. ‘You cannot stirre abroad,’ he wrote of his Turkish adventures, ‘but you shall be presented by the Dervishes and Janizaries with tulips and trifles’6. Seyhulislam Ebusuud (1490–1573) was one of the first of the Ottoman florists to specialise in tulips, introducing one of the great favourites of contemporary gardens, the Nur-i Adn, or ‘Light of Paradise’7. The different tulips available in Turkey in the sixteenth century were illustrated in a painted mural decorating the walls of the fine Tulip Kiosk, which once overhung the Bosphorus at Anadolu Hissar. It was built, not by the Sultan himself, but by one of his Grand Viziers, desperate to curry favour with his master. Sultan Selim II was a besotted gardener. In 1574, he ordered the Sheriff of Aziz (now Azez in Syria, 7km south of the Turkish frontier) to send him 50,000 tulip bulbs for the imperial gardens at Constantinople. These must have been species tulips, gathered from the wild to be used in mass plantings. Another 300,000 bulbs were despatched for the palace gardens from Kefe (now Feodosiya in the Ukraine).8 Needless to say, the Sultan never had to put his hand in his own pocket to pay for his passions. However, high prices were paid for particular kinds of unusual tulip. In Turkey (and later in Holland) laws had to be enforced to bring speculation under control. The Sultan ordered the Mayor of Istanbul to publish fixed prices for the most sought-after tulips; anyone who tried to sell bulbs at a higher price was expelled from the city. Transgressors were lucky to get off so lightly. The Sultan’s high-ranking head gardener was also his chief executioner.

  Later Sultans continued to demand equally vast quantities of bulbs from their subordinates in the provinces. ‘Orders to the Administrator of Maras’ wrote Sultan Murad III, who ruled from 1574–1595. ‘Since there are no hyacinth bulbs in the palace gardens, you are ordered to collect 50,000 white hyacinths and 50,000 sky-blue hyacinths from the hyacinth colonies growing in the mountains and highlands of Maras. And because of the urgency of the matter, you are ordered to do the following:

  ‘Dispatch youths who are knowledgeable of flowers into the region and send them out with people who can be trusted to gather the above amount of hyacinth bulbs with all haste. Once obtained, hand them to ones dispatched under my orders and bring the bulbs to the castle gate of the town. Also write to inform me how many bulbs you could obtain. Those who brought bulbs can demand payment according to the numbers brought. The foregoing is of extreme importance. Strive to make efforts and be careful. Avoid sloth or carelessness. Emperor’s Order, the year 1001 of the Islamic calendar, the 7th day of the month of Sa’ban [9 May 1593].’ Similar orders had already gone out to the Governor of Uzeyr in Aleppo. But how did the poor collectors tell the flowers apart when they were out of bloom and ready to dig up? The whisk of the executioner’s axe must have been echoing very loud in their ears as they packed up the bulbs for their long journey to the capital from the wilds of southern Anatolia.

  A miniature of 1582 from the Surname by the Ottoman artist, Osman, celebrates the circumcision of Sultan Murad Ill’s heir, Prince Mehmed, when, according to contemporary accounts, the feasting went on for fifty-two days. The Surname miniatures indicate how sophisticated the cultivation of tulips must have been in Turkey at this time. One shows a procession of turbaned Turks carrying towering pagodas (like huge tulip vases), each one sprouting a cargo of red tulips. In another illustration, bands of gardeners carry entire miniature gardens, about nine feet square, built on flat platforms. They are decorated with clipped evergreens and miniature garden buildings. Cages of canaries hang from the fruit trees and long, thin-flowered tulips are planted formally in the borders. Contemporary accounts suggest that the gardens may have been made entirely from wax or marzipan.9

  This devotion to tulips was not confined to the rulers in Constantinople. Sir Thomas Herbert, who travelled in Iran between 1627 and 1628, described one of many gardens made by Shah ’Abbas, this one in a desert near Isfahan. Between stone pools lined with marble, flourished peaches, pomegranates, plums and pears, all underplanted with damask roses, tulips and other flowers.10 A similar scene is captured in an Indian miniature of c1685, where a garden pavilion overlooks a central water canal. Either side figs, pomegranates and mangos are planted in a geometric grid, the grass underneath them lit up with narcissi and tulips. Throughout the whole of the Mogul period in India, following the great Babur’s victory at Panipat in 1526, gardens flourished. Babur’s own favourite garden was at Kabul. His great-grandson, the Emperor Jahangir, an equally obsessive and gifted maker of gardens, favoured Kashmir. ‘In the soul enchanting spring’, he noted on a visit to Kashmir in 1620, ‘the hills and plains are filled with blossoms; the gates, the walls, the courts, the roofs are lighted up by the torches of banquet-adorning tulips.’ Jahangir engaged the artist Ustad Mansur to paint a hundred of his favourite flowers, including some superb red tulips which look like the wild species T. lanata.11 T. lanata is a Central Asian tulip, probably introduced into Kashmir by the Moguls during the sixteenth century and much planted on the roofs of mosques. Mansur’s painting shows four of the tulips, each at a different stage of development, from bud to full-blown flower, contained within an intricate double border. He noted the characteristic pale midrib that often runs from tip to base of tulip petals, usually more prominent on the outer surface than the inner. The image, superbly detailed, must have been painted from life, but it was not always so. Some Indian miniatures show tulips that seem to have been copied from the illustrations in early European books such as those published by Rembert Dodoens in 1569 and Clusius in 1576. One, painted c1635 by the Mogul artist, Balchand, shows the three sons of Shah Jehan riding out together, the whole scene contained in a rich border
of flowers. The stocky red tulip in the top right-hand corner of the border is extraordinarily like the tulip illustrated by Conrad Gesner in his Appendix to Cordus’s Annotationes of 1561.12 Another miniature of the same period centres on a splendid turkey, the brilliant red of his wattles echoed in the colour of the delicate tulip to his left Was the painter, like Mansur, painting from life? Or was he copying a strikingly similar tulip illustrated in Clusius’s Rariorum aliquot Stirpium of 1583.13 Later, in China and Japan, ceramicists also plundered European originals for motifs. Tulips in rigid bouquets copied from the flower paintings of artists such as Jan Brueghel and Jacques de Gheyn began to appear in the early eighteenth century as motifs on the export porcelain known as Chine de Commande. Tulips glittered in gold with pink carnations, roses and botanically impossible daffodils.

  By the 1630s, the traveller, Evliya Celebi, estimated that there were at least 300 florists based in and around Istanbul as well as about eighty flower shops. He also noted how richly the gardens along the Bosphorus were planted with tulips, many of them popular destinations for visitors making excursions by boat from the capital. The meadows at Kâğithane, where two streams ran into the Golden Horn, were particularly famous for their display of tulips, ‘intoxicating’, Celebi said, in their season. He also mentions ‘Kefe’ tulips, that is, tulips from Kefe (Feodosiya) a name that was known in western Europe too. Clusius (Charles de l’Ecluse 1526–1609), the first director of the botanic garden at Leiden in Holland, also talked of the Cafe lale and the same tulip appeared in the 1630 list of flowers grown by Sultan Murad IV (1609–1640). He had fifty-six different kinds of tulip; some were so scarce that even the Sultan himself could not get hold of more than one bulb. But during this period, there was a marked increase in the number of different varieties available and Turkish florists-in-chief were already setting up councils (encumen-i danis-i sukufe) to judge the new tulips being bred by the country’s florists. In a system adopted later by early European florists, only the best flowers were given distinguishing and official names. Sari Abdullah Efendi was florist-in-chief (ser sukufeci) to the Sultan Ibrahim who ruled from 1640 to 1648, but it was Sultan Mehmed IV, ruler for the next forty years, who brought the system to perfection. Only the most flawless cultivars were entered into the official tulip list, each appearing with a description and the name of the grower who had bred the flower. The Council even had its own research laboratory, where new cultivars could be assessed in a more leisurely way.