The Tulip Read online

  Gesner also published the first European illustration of a tulip, the Augsburg one, shown in a vigorous woodcut, copied from a painting made either by him or one of his team of assistants. Scribbled around it are notes about the tulip: its provenance, its foliage and other aides-mémoire. The painting shows a fat, low-growing flower as wide as it is high, with six pointed petals that first close in, then flip out insouciantly at the top. Gesner noted that the tulip originated in ‘Byzantium’ and says that he had already been sent a picture of this tulip by Johan Kentmann (1518–1574), a German naturalist and painter who was in Italy between 1549 and 1551. Gesner’s original watercolours8 included not only the Augsburg tulip, dated 1557, but also a yellow tulip, a series of three blooms, shown from the front, the back and in profile. Although it is labelled ‘Narcissi lutei odorati’ it is obviously the species now called T. sylvestris, which appeared in many of the early treatises on tulips. They are beautifully arranged on the page, with bulbs and a seed capsule, as well as the three flowers. Two of them have seven petals. The middle one has eight, but T. sylvestris does show a greater tendency than any other species to produce flowers with extra petals. The description notes the tulip’s scent, another relatively unusual trait in this tribe.9

  After Gesner, tulips appeared in a tumult of books, though not always under the right name. When in 1565, the Italian physician and botanist, Pier Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577) published his Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis, the tulip again masqueraded under the label ‘Narcissus’, though the fine illustration (the woodcuts were by Giorgio Liberale of Udine and the German, Wolfgang Meyerpeck) shows that it is undoubtedly a tulip, the leaves, broad and undulate, climbing up the stem in a way that is more typical than the foliage shown in Gesner’s illustration. Mattioli was followed into print by the Mechelen physician and botanist, Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585). A beautiful tulip was one of the seven woodcuts contributed to his book by Pieter van der Borcht, but stepping uncertainly in the minefield of nomenclature, Dodoens mostly opted for the wide-embracing tag of ‘Lilionarcissus’ for his tulips, saying they came from Thrace and Cappadocia.10 Eight years later, one of the tulips illustrated in Dodoens’s book appeared as ‘Lilionarcissus chalcedonicus’ in a herbal called Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia, written by Matthias de L’Obel (or Lobelius). It describes thirty-seven tulips, including the beautiful red and white Lady Tulip, T. clusiana. He also showed what seems to be a yellow form of the variable, multi-flowered T. praestans, a less formidable tongue twister than Lobelius’s name, ‘Lilionarcissus luteus Bononiensis’. Lobelius noted the fact that this tulip could have two or three flowers on a stem and that it smelt of yellow wallflowers. The English physician John Gerard later used the same illustration in his Herball of 1597, but called the flower T. narbonensis. This was typical of the taxonomic mess that existed before Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the Swedish botanist, brought order to the naming of plants.

  Like Clusius, Lobelius (1538–1616) had studied under Rondelet at Montpellier, and on Rondelet’s death, inherited all his manuscripts. He practised as a physician in Antwerp and Delft before departing for England around 1566. There, he settled temporarily among fellow Flemings such as James Garrett in London but returned to the Netherlands to become physician to William the Silent. After William’s murder, he settled permanently in England as James I’s official botanist. That position gave him prestige, but was nowhere near as important as his job superintending Lord Zouche’s garden at Hackney. Until the botanic garden at Oxford was set up in 1621, Britain had no equivalent to the great European centres of learning at Padua, Vienna or Leiden. Plant collections were put together by rich aristocrats and, among these, Zouche was paramount. His Hackney garden was a gathering point for all the best British botanists; Lobelius provided an important intellectual link between Britain and mainland Europe.

  Lobelius, born at Lille in Flanders, wrote that a taste for plants had existed among the Flemish as far back as the time of the crusades and had flourished particularly under the Duke of Burgundy. He claimed that they had been the first to bring back plants from the Levant and that Flemish gardens contained more rare plants than could be found in the whole of the rest of Europe put together. Most of the gardens had been destroyed in the civil wars of the sixteenth century, but Lobelius mentions several Flemish tulip growers: Carolus de Croy, Prince of Chymay, Joannes de Brancion (who later lent his name to a particular kind of feathered tulip, the ‘Testament Brancion’), Joannes van der Dilf, George Rye, Johannes Mutonus and Maria de Brimeu, wife of Conrardi Scetz.11

  Tulips appeared of course in the first plant picture book,12 traditionally attributed to Lobelius, but now thought to have been compiled by Gobelius, physician to the Duke of Prussia.13 This was an entirely opportunistic venture by the Flemish printer, Christophe Plantin (c1520–1589), a way of getting yet another return from some very tired woodblocks. Tulips, twenty-three different kinds of them, took up ten pages of the book, several of them, including T. praecox alba, T. praecox lutea, and T. praecox rubra, then being used by Plantin yet again in Clusius’s study Rariorum aliquot Stirpium … published in the same year.

  Because the earliest illustrations of tulips were printed in monochrome (and because names varied so wildly), identifying them by their present names is a chancy business. Written descriptions rarely give information that is detailed enough to distinguish between one species and another. Early descriptive names often mention flowering period – ‘praecox’ (early) or ‘media’ (mid-season) and colour – typically ‘luteus’ or ‘coccineus’. Sometimes there are phrases such as ‘rubris striatis’ or ‘candore et rubore confusus’ which suggest that tulips with broken colour had arrived on the scene. The books in which tulips first appeared were primarily herbals, used to identify plants and note their usefulness in terms of food or medicine. Even tulips had a practical application: the bulbs could curdle milk. The herbals were used by physicians who were necessarily also gardeners; they were not made for gardeners per se. Their needs were met by the florilegiums which began to appear in the early seventeenth century, when covetousness started to play a greater part in gardening. ‘Broken’ tulips had been enthusiastically collected since 1585, after Gesner, Mattioli and Lobelius had published their various works. Clusius talks of enthusiasts such as Joanne de Hogelande, who in 1590 had sent him news of a tulip ‘cujus flos omnia folia mucronata habet’.14

  Long before Linnaeus, Clusius tried hard in this last book to bring order into the confused nomenclature of the time; as the new name of the genus became established, the ‘Lilionarcissi’ of previous books gave way to ‘Tulipa’. Clusius sorted them into several groups: eight different ‘praecox’ (the early-flowering kinds), followed by ‘serotinas’ (late-flowering) and ‘dubias’ (in between). The illustrations were the familiar ones originally commissioned by Plantin, possibly the hardest-working woodblocks in the history of printing. The names of course were different. The ‘Lilionarcissus alba’ of the 1581 Icones became ‘Tulipa praecox flava’. ‘Lilionarcissus luteus phoenico’ from the same book became ‘T. dubia major’. One of the Icones tulips, ‘Lilionarcissus rubellus nitidus, candidis oris’ appears (reversed out) on the fancy title page of Clusius’s book, the centrepiece of the design, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides reclining in anguished attitudes either side of it. A few of the woodcuts (‘T. serotina minor’, ‘T. pumilio altera’) were new, suggesting that these tulips were more recent arrivals on the garden scene.

  By the time this last work of Clusius’s was published, painters had begun to overtake illustrators. Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), court painter to the Emperor Rudolph II, bridged the hazy division between the illuminators of manuscripts and the painters of still lifes. His tulips are fat, waisted flowers with pointed petals that flip out at the top, more sophisticated than Gesner’s red tulip, and in a wider range of colours. He shows a beautiful yellow tulip, finely feathered in red, an elegant pink one surveyed by an Alice in Wonderland caterpillar rearing from
a pear alongside, and, on another folio, two tulips emblematically and symmetrically arranged with entwined stems. The leaves are undulate, the flowers pear-shaped with petals that finish in the characteristic pointed flourish; Hoefnagel emphasises the broad midrib running up the back of the tulips’ petals. One of his flowers is red, the other a curious and not entirely convincing combination of red, blue and green. The green flare up the back of the petals is, though, typical of the type of tulips known as ‘viridifloras’, and it may be that the pigment he used on the parts that are now blue was originally a colour more typical of the tulip.15 Oddly, exactly the same colour appears in a later flower study by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625).16

  This was an age of overwhelming interest in plants: in Vienna and throughout Germany, in the Low Countries and in England, those with time and money spent it on laying out gardens and filling them with the treasures that explorers and botanists such as Belon, Gesner and Rauwolf brought back from their travels. Leonhardt Rauwolf was a German physician who corresponded with both Clusius and Gesner and was part of the great network or information exchange that linked scholars in western Europe. In 1573, he had left his home in Augsburg with the purpose of gaining ‘a clear and distinct knowledge’ of plants by seeking them out in their native habitats. His plant-collecting took him to the Near East, from where he brought back more than 800 different plants, some still preserved in the herbarium at Leiden. He saw the original cedars on Mount Lebanon, found wild rhubarb, collected ‘a pretty sort of tulip’ with yellow stripes, and, like Belon, noted the Turks’ delight in flowers of all kinds. Like Belon, too, he described their habit of wearing flowers in their turbans, useful to him, as he could ‘see the fine plants that blow one after another daily’.17

  Once introduced, the tulip spread rapidly. It had been first noted in Europe at Augsburg in 1559. It was in Antwerp by 1562, in other parts of Belgium by 1583, in Leiden (thanks to Clusius) by 1590, in Middleburg and Lucerne by 1596, in Montpellier by 1598. Double tulips were already being described by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The flowers fitted admirably with the spirit of the age and the prevailing craze for ‘curiosities’ to be displayed in horticultural Wunderkammer, with each rare and cherished flower exhibited like a jewel. Scholars such as Clusius and Lobelius collected these curiosities to further their scientific work. Princes and power brokers wanted them as status symbols, for only the wealthy could afford to garden for pleasure. The painter Crispyn de Passe showed the kind of gardens they made: small, enclosed spaces, divided into a grid of rectangular beds, sparsely planted by modern standards, but containing fabulous treasures such as crown imperials, Iris susiana newly introduced from Turkey, hyacinths and, of course, tulips, the most sought after, costly and prestigious flowers that a seventeenth-century gardener could possess.

  With this new interest in growing plants for show, the emphasis of plant books published in the early seventeenth century gradually changed. Emmanuel Sweert’s superb hand-coloured Florilegium published in Frankfurt in 1612, and the Hortus Eystettenis which came out the following year are books for gardeners, catalogues, records of collections. Magnificent ‘garden’ tulips appear, feathered and flamed in gorgeous colours, obviously much more highly developed than the tulip species illustrated in earlier books. Technology helped too, for engravings on copper plates, which gradually replaced woodblocks as a source of illustration, allowed much more detail to be captured on the pages of early seventeenth-century books.

  The Hortus Eystettensis was made for Johann Conrad von Gemmingen, the Prince-Bishop of Eichstatt in Germany, who had one of the finest gardens of the early seventeenth century, planted with nearly all the shrubs and flowering plants known at the time. Tulips were there in quantity of course, as were shrubs just imported from America. When the garden was finished, the Bishop commissioned the botanist-apothecary Basilius Besler, who had helped develop the garden, to produce a record of it. It was published in 1613 with 367 plates illustrating more than a thousand of the Bishop’s plants.

  Writing to Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, the Bishop explained that ‘the garden plants were brought back, through the offices of local merchants, above all from the Netherlands, for example from Antwerp, Brussels, Amsterdam and other places…’ Wilhelm’s agent visited the garden on 17 May 1611 and described eight different areas, each of which ‘contained flowers from a different country; they varied in the beds and flowers, especially in the beautiful roses, lilies, tulips.’ Each week, one or two boxes of flowers were sent to Nuremberg to be drawn by artists working on the great book, which the Bishop estimated would cost him upwards of 3,000 florins. Among the tulips sumptuously illustrated is a short-stemmed T. praecox with hyacinths and an unmistakeable T. sylvestris (still labelled as ‘Lilionarcissus bononiensis’) alongside leucojum. Most of the tulips, though, were showy striped, edged and flamed garden varieties rather than species. Some look remarkably modern. The Parrot tulip ‘Fantasy’ is a twentieth-century creation, but here in the Bishop’s book is its twin, a mad raspberry-pink tulip, feathered in green. His ‘Tulipa nivea oris purpurascente’ shows a strange aberration, the colour of the petals repeated on a quasi-leaf further down the stem, just the same oddity that characterises the double late tulip ‘Blue Flag’ that flowers in my own garden.

  The Hortus Eystettensis was part of an early-seventeenth-century explosion of books which followed on from the pioneering works of Gesner and Mattioli.18 The Bishop’s book was a record of a collection. Emmanuel Sweert’s 1612 Florilegium was a nursery sales catalogue, the first Europe had seen. It had no text, but the plants were helpfully arranged in family groups on the pages. Unlike earlier herbals, many of Sweert’s plants were described in purely ornamental terms and he included pages of ravishing tulips, intricately patterned in an extraordinarily diverse range of colours.

  The Margrave of Baden-Durlach was a model customer, ordering thousands of bulbs each year from Holland. He spent more than a thousand florins each season on bulbs, fifty times as much as a nurse or a washerwoman could earn in an entire year. By 1636, his garden inventory listed 4,796 tulips. Some of the rarest were represented by a single precious bulb; other more common varieties grew in their thousands. The Margraves never lost their taste for tulips. In 1715 the new Margrave, Karl Wilhelm (1679–1738), rebuilt fabulous gardens at Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, the two wings of the new castle enclosing a pleasure garden with complex parterres. Hand-written catalogues of the plant collections still exist and the list for 1730 shows 2,329 tulips. By 1733 the collection had grown to 3,868 different varieties, with nearly another thousand added over the next three years. The Margrave bought his tulip bulbs from seventeen different Dutch firms, fifteen of them in Haarlem. Like the Prince-Bishop before him, he commissioned paintings of his most precious plants. The watercolours made by Georg Ehret (1708–1770) alone filled twenty volumes and he painted 5,000 tulips.

  Johann Jakob Walther (c1600–1679) made a similar florilegium for Count Johann of Nassau at Idstein. The castle, near Frankfurt am Main, had been rebuilt at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but by the end of the Thirty Years War was once again in ruins. On his return from exile, Count Johann set repair work in hand, laying out a fine formal garden with a summerhouse and grotto. Walther came to paint the rare flowers in the garden and showed the place in all its glory: neat parterres planted with crown imperials and tulips, carefully clipped box edgings, tubs of evergreens, statues and garden buildings, the proud owner with his wife and daughter, posed in the garden, portraits of peonies, irises, roses, carnations and of course tulips, many of them gorgeously striped in contrasting colours. The pointed, waisted tulip that Hoefnagel had portrayed a hundred years earlier has already changed into a wider flower, the petals more softly rounded at their tips. The three types that would later be designated as Bizarres, Roses and Bybloemens are clearly distinguished, the Bizarres streaked with red on a yellow ground, the Roses feathered and flamed with red on a white ground and the Bybloemens marked wit
h rich purple on a white ground. The leaves are decidedly waved.19

  The seventeenth-century Margrave of Baden-Durlach and the Count of Nassau were not alone in their passion. In Italy, the Duke of Sermoneta boasted of 15,000 tulips in the flower parterre of his garden at Cisterna. Tulips had been known in Italy since at least the middle of the sixteenth century when the Venetian, Pietro Michiel (1510–1566) left the important Botanical Garden at Padua, which he had been looking after, and returned to his own garden in Venice to produce a fine herbal, I Cinque Libri di Piante, with drawings of T. sylvestris, and T. praecox. The Spanish painter Juan van der Hamen y Leon’s grand flower pieces of the 1620s show that the flower was a favourite in the Iberian peninsula too. His stiff heraldic tulips, predominantly reds and yellows, appear with sunflowers, irises and gladioli in several important still lifes, the flowers often arranged in the same ornate glass vase with fittings of scrolled gold.