The Tulip Read online

  Once Turkish florists started to breed their own tulips, rather than select the best of what nature offered in the wild (and this was now happening in the West as well as the East), the flower was shaped in a very particular way. In western Europe, tulip lovers favoured a rounded, cup-shaped flower, well marked with contrasting colours. The Turkish florists’ standards were equally uncompromising, but they favoured tall thin tulips, narrowly contoured and made up of dagger-shaped petals. The petals themselves had to be of good texture – stiff yet smooth – and of one colour. Each of the six petals had to be the same size and length. In a perfect flower, the petals would conceal the stamens, with no gaps between them, but the pistil would just be visible. The flower had to stand erect on its stem, thin and well balanced. The shape of the petals was the cause of most concern. Tulip breeders always selected strains with narrow, pointed petals. Daggers and needles were what they wanted. ‘If the tulip has not these petal characters’ wrote an early pundit, ‘it is a cheap flower. The tulip with the needle end is the better of the two; if it has both the dagger shape and the needle point, it is priceless’.14 There was an equally rigid list of defects in a flower. A flawed tulip was one with a soft stalk and scattered, dull, loose, irregular petals. Sometimes – a characteristic inherited from many wild tulips – the inner petals were broader and shorter than the outer ones. This was a fault too. Evaluating the new cultivars was a long and difficult job. But if a tulip did manage to get onto the magic list, it was universally fêted. Poets wrote couplets to the debutante flowers, celebrating their beauty and form. Prizes were given for the best verses, as well as to the breeders of the best flowers. Even the most resourceful poet might be stumped by the prosaic names – ‘Goudstuk’, ‘Hit Parade’, ‘Mickey Mouse’ – of some modern tulip cultivars but Turkish tulips were given wonderfully evocative names – ‘Those that Burn the Heart’, ‘Matchless Pearl’. That helped. So did the fact that lale, the Turkish word for tulip, happened to rhyme with piyale, a wine glass. The wine metaphor was squeezed to the last drop. The names themselves were often Arabic or Persian – Nize-i rummani (Pomegranate lance), Peymane-i Gulgun (Rose-coloured Glass), Ferah-efza (Increaser of Joy), only occasionally Turkish – Buyuk al (Big Scarlet), Ikbal Yildizi (Star of Felicity). The wonderfully extravagant tags – ‘Delicate Coquette’, ‘Slim One of the Rose Garden’, ‘Light of the Mind’, ‘Diamond’s Envy’, ‘Beloved’s Face’ – were a testament to the esteem in which the tulips themselves were held.

  But how did this almond-shaped, dagger-petalled tulip arise? What wild species contributed to its singular conformation? In shape it is closest to the spidery-petalled T. acuminata. But that tulip, although given species status, is actually unknown in the wild and is generally supposed to be itself a garden tulip. The needle-pointed Turkish tulip did not necessarily come from any of the fourteen wild-species tulips to be found in the country for, by the mid-seventeenth century, the tide of the tulip trade had turned. The first tulips seen in western Europe had arrived there from Turkey, but in 1651 the Austrian Ambassador, Schmid von Schwarzenhorn, brought forty tulips of ten different varieties from Europe into Istanbul as a gift for the Emperor Mehmed IV. They continued to be grown in Turkey under their Austrian names and Mehmed Efendi, the author of the Lalezar-i Ibrahim (1726) said that the whole development of what became known as the Istanbul tulip with its thin dagger-petalled flowers, originated with those ten varieties. Others, too, believed that the Turkish tulip had been created with the gubari tali– literally fertilisation powder or more prosaically pollen – from the European bulbs. Tulips also arrived in Turkey from Crete (probably the mauve-flowered T. saxatilis) and were noted by an Italian traveller, Dr Bennetti, in his diary of 1680: ‘In the garden of the house at which a dinner was given to me at Eyoub on the Golden Horn, were magnificent tulips growing three or four on a stem. They are imported from Crete’. M H Hoog, a Dutch authority on tulips, has argued that the long thin-petalled species T. schrenkii from the steppe regions of the Crimea, brought to Istanbul under the name ‘Kefe tulip’, must have played a part in the breeding of the Istanbul tulip. It was from Kefe in the Ukraine that Sultan Selim II had ordered 300,000 tulips to be despatched for the palace gardens. And sixty years later, the historian Hodja Hasan Efendi, who in 1638 was with Sultan Murad IV on his expedition to Baghdad, brought back seven different kinds of tulip to grow in his Istanbul garden. Out of this great melting pot of species and their variants, the Istanbul tulip somehow emerged.

  Other travellers, besides Belon and Busbecq, commented on the overwhelming passion that the Turks had for tulips. In 1673, Antoine Galland, a diplomat from the French embassy, passed along the same road between Edirne and Istanbul that Busbecq had taken more than a hundred years earlier. ‘Had a wonderful time today,’ he wrote in his diary on Monday 15 May 1673. ‘This was because of the fine weather and the large fields of tulips and peonies along the road to Burgaz.’ Sir John Chardin, the seventeenth-century author of Travels in Persia made it clear that the flower was no less extravagantly regarded over the border in Iran. ‘When a young man presents a tulip to his mistress he gives her to understand by the general colour of the flower, that he is on fire with her beauty, and by the black base, that his heart is burned to coal’.15 Mehmed bin Ahmed-ul Ubeydi’s Netayicu’l-ezhar [The Achievement of Flowers] published in 1699, was only the first of a long series of Turkish manuscripts celebrating the beauty of the tulip and the skills of those who bred them. Ubeydi was the Imam of the Cerrahpasa Mosque and his work names 202 of the most outstanding tulip breeders of the age. They seem mostly to have been people of rank – pashas, mullahs, captains in the Janissary Guard. He also included descriptions of the tulips – and narcissi – grown by these specialists. ‘The Juge’, he wrote, was the colour of the buds of the Judas tree. ‘The stripes are white or nearly so. The tips of each petal are pointed acutely. Sometimes this same tulip has no stripe. It was first exhibited by Juge Chelebi at Scutari. Some pretend that this bulb comes from Europe.’ It could have. The description fits the celebrated Dutch tulip ‘Viceroy’.

  The most important florist in Istanbul at the beginning of the eighteenth century was Seyh Mehmed Lalezari, head gardener to Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasa. His book Mizanu ’l-Ezhar [The Manual of Flowers], published in Istanbul, gives a thorough account of the properties of the etiolated Istanbul tulip, peculiar to this time and place. In Part 1, Mehmed lists the twenty points to which a good tulip should conform. The six petals should be long and equal in length. They should close together neatly, with no gaps between them. The pollen should not be allowed to stain the flower. The stem should be long and strong. The leaves should also be long, but not so long that they overshadow the flower. The flower itself should be held erect on the stem and its colour pure and clear. In ‘broken’ or bicoloured tulips, a white ground colour was preferred to yellow (French and English florists shared this preference for white grounds). The petals should be smooth-edged rather than jagged. Double flowers were completely beyond the pale. One of the most valuable tulips of the time was ‘Luluu Ezrak’ (Blue Pearl) which grew in the palace gardens at Ciragan with a flower as big as an ostrich egg. Sometimes, as with ‘Luluu Ezrak’, the name of a tulip reflected the colour of its flower; sometimes it commemorated the person who had bred it, as in ‘The Deep Red of Ibrahim Bey’. Mostly the epithets were purely fanciful, ‘One that Confuses Reason’, ‘One that Burns the Heart’.

  The Turkish code was even tighter than the one which ruled fanciers of the English florist’s tulip, though in many ways the two bodies shared similar prejudices in their definitions of the perfect tulip. The chief difference between the two concerned the shape of the flower. English florists alternately boxed and coaxed the tulip into the shape they considered the zenith of perfection – the half sphere. Turkish growers selected tulips that had long, thin pointed petals, aiming at a flower that was as spidery as they could make it. After setting out these criteria for the perfect tulip, Mehmed devotes the second
part of his book to ways of achieving them. The third part deals with narcissus.16

  Ahmed’s reign, which lasted from 1703–1730, is generally designated by historians as the lale devri, the Tulip Era. The Sultan was completely ruled by the vagaries of his favourite flower and it was at this stage that the tide turned in the bulb trade between East and West, for Ahmed III imported millions of tulip bulbs from Holland to decorate his gardens. By this time, no one in Europe could match the Dutch growers in the production and marketing of flower bulbs. According to a contemporary manuscript, Turkish tulip traders ‘increased from day to day’ and ‘exchanged amongst themselves different kinds of tulip bulbs which gave rise to different and most beautiful varieties’.17 But Ahmed’s passion for tulips led to his downfall. His subjects rose in revolt against him, because of the vast amount of money he spent each year on extravagantly staged tulip festivals. The Dutch, with their own tulipomania of the 1630s firmly behind them, had no compunction in encouraging others down the same prodigal route.

  Tulips filled the imperial gardens. They also appeared on carvings, fountains, tombs and murals. Even the Fruit Room at Ahmed Ill’s Topkapi Palace was decorated with tulips: bunches of flowers in vases which contained hyacinths and carnations as well as the immensely long dagger-like tulips favoured in the Ottoman Empire. The bulbs that filled the Palace garden were now western ones, and the style of decoration in the Fruit Room also suggests a western influence. The Turkish custom had been to display flowers, whether real or painted, as single specimens; now they were shown in mixed bunches. Trade with the West was increasing and early European travellers, such as Belon, were followed by a wave of incomers, many of them diplomats like William Sherard (1659–1728), British Consul at Smyrna from 1703–1716. Sherard was an accomplished botanist and, after taking his degree at Oxford in 1683, studied with Tournefort in Paris between 1686 and 1688, and with Hermann in Leiden from 1688 to 1689. It was he who was responsible for bringing to England the brilliant German botanist, Johann Jacob Dillenius (1684–1747). In 1732, Sherard’s brother James persuaded Dillenius to compile the Hortus Elthamensis, an important survey of the plants growing in Sherard’s Eltham garden. James Sherard was an apothecary and his garden at Eltham was noted for its rare plants; some of them, including tulips, may have been supplied by his brother in Smyrna.

  Under Sultan Ahmed III, Turkey became a hotbed of floriculture. High in the summer pastures of the Sipylus mountains above Manisa were the Sultan’s tulip fields, where bulbs were propagated to fill the palace gardens at Ciragan, Sa’d Abad and Nesat Abad. At tulip time, the Grand Vizier provided his father-in-law, the Sultan, with nightly entertainment in the Ciragan gardens. (The name Ciragan was derived from the word for the mirrored lanterns that were used in their thousands to light the gardens.) Music filled the grounds where the Sultan’s five wives took the air. One of the courtyards of the Grand Seraglio was turned into an open-air theatre; thousands of tulip flowers were mounted on pyramids and towers, with lanterns and cages of singing birds hung between them. Tulips filled the flower beds, each variety marked with a label of filigree silver. At the signal from a cannon, the doors of the harem were opened and the Sultan’s mistresses were led out into the garden by eunuchs carrying torches. Guests had to dress in clothes that matched the tulips (and avoid setting themselves on fire by brushing against candles carried on the backs of hundreds of tortoises that ambled around the grounds). One of these tulip extravaganzas was described by Monsieur d’Andresel, the French Ambassador to Constantinople in the early eighteenth century. ‘The Grand Vizier [Ahmed Ill’s son-in-law, Damat Ibrahim Pasha] and others of the Court have a great taste for flowers, above all for Tulips,’ he wrote in a letter dated 24 April 1726. ‘There are 500,000 bulbs in the Grand Vizier’s garden. When the Tulips are in flower and the Grand Vizier wants to show them off to the Grand Seigneur, they take care to fill in any spaces with Tulips picked from other gardens and put in bottles. At every fourth flower, candles are set into the ground at the same height as the tulips, and the pathways are decorated with cages of all sorts of birds. All the trellis-work is bordered with flowers in vases, and lit up by a vast number of crystal lamps of various colours. Greenery is brought in from the woods roundabout and used as a background behind the trellises. The colours and reflections of the lights in mirrors makes a marvellous effect. The illuminations are accompanied by noisy music and Turkish music lasts through all the nights that the tulips are in flower. All this is at the expense of the Grand Vizier, who during the whole of tulip time, lodges and feeds the Grand Seigneur and his suite.’ And doubtless found a way to reimburse himself later for the expense.18

  Izzet Ali Pasa and other poets of the period celebrated tulips in chronograms, poems which gave clues as to their date in the letters of their last verses. The fabulous tulip ‘Nize-i-Rummani’ (variously translated as ‘Pomegranate-coloured Lance’ or ‘The Roman’s Spear’) was endlessly chronogrammed. But, unlike the situation in Holland, where many tulip books were made, either to commemorate the collections of tulips built up by rich owners, or to advertise the bulbs for sale at specialist dealers, only one illustrated book of Turkish tulips is known to exist. This is a fine, leather-bound volume measuring 22cm × 31cm and containing illustrations of forty-nine different varieties of Istanbul tulip. It is not dated, but by comparing the names of the tulips with those in other published and dated manuscripts and the frames painted around them on the pages with similar decorations in other sources, the Turkish historian Ekrem Hakki Ayverdi concluded that it must have been produced in the reign of Sultan Ahmed III, most probably around 1725. Ayverdi owned the book for a time, but sold it in the 1960s to raise funds to publish his four-volume work on the history of the Ottoman Empire.19

  Ayverdi pointed out that in all the Turkish literature on tulips, this is the only book to contain illustrations.20 The paintings are done on thick, coated, wheat-coloured Indian paper. Forty-four tulips are named, seven of them painted more than once. Most of the tulips are shown contained in frames, painted round them on the page. The book starts with the valuable ‘The Roman’s Spear’ tulip, painted in three different styles. One of the paintings seems to show its narrow petals tied round with a thin thread. This is a trick that tulip fanciers used later in England to stop their blooms opening out wider than the much-to-be-desired half sphere, the little corset of cotton thread being whipped away just before the judges approached the show bench. Turkish growers also followed English growers in believing that they could change the colour of their tulips, or persuade them to ‘break’ into multi-coloured stripes, by mixing the required colour into the earth in which the bulbs were to be planted. The writer of the Revnak’i Bostan suggested in 1660 that growers could turn flowers purple by mixing a little grape juice into the soil.

  ‘The Roman’s Spear’ is followed by paintings of ‘One That Scatters and Blooms’ and ‘One That Changes Owners’ both of them red finely streaked with yellow. It may have been that the order in which the tulips appeared in the book reflected their relative value. The colour range is wide, reproducing the equally wide range found in wild populations of T. schrenkii, the species from which these Istanbul tulips may have been derived. Reds predominate, in every shade from the palest pink of ‘One That Flatters’ to the deep, saturated red of ‘Huseyni’. ‘One That Increases Joy’, a pale creamy-yellow tulip streaked with pinkish red, is very like the form of T. acuminata that grows in the National Collection of tulips at the Cambridge Botanic Garden, England. There is one pure white tulip, ‘Spring Morning’, and three clear yellows, ‘The Vizier’s Finger’, ‘Turuncu Sheyhi’ and ‘One That Gives Light’. One of the most unusual is ‘Cucemoru’, deep purple, grey and cream, the colours of the gris-de-lin that Sir Thomas Hanmer had valued so highly in his Welsh garden a hundred years earlier. But no one in Britain grew tulips so strangely etiolated as these Istanbul tulips. All the flowers shown in the manuscript are of the same type, most of them accompanied by a single, undulating leaf. Som
e of the paintings are signed by Rekame Mehmed and E H Ayverdi believed that all the paintings were by the same artist. Most of the tulips appear as single specimens, most often shown facing to the left. Just one of the tulips, the fabulous ‘The Roman’s Spear’, appears in a rich blue laledan, the special glass vase with a bulbous base and a long, thin neck, developed by the Turks to show off single, precious blooms. Almost 200 years earlier, the French traveller, Pierre Belon, had noted how important these vases were in the Turks’ ritualistic devotion to the tulip. The laledan were usually about 20cm high and could be made of silver or other highly polished metals, as well as glass. Sukufedan were larger vases and were used for all kinds of flowers, not just tulips. They were wider at the neck than the laledan and swelled out to a bulb in the middle, narrowing to a pedestal or foot at the bottom.