The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (10 page)

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There are flowers, and then there are flowers: flowers, I mean, around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers with an empire’s worth of history behind them, flowers whose form and color and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people’s ideas and desires through time like great books. It’s a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colors of human dreams, and this may explain why only a small handful of them have proven themselves supple and willing enough for the task. The rose, obviously, is one such flower; the peony, particularly in the East, is another. The orchid certainly qualifies. And then there is the tulip. Arguably there are a couple more (perhaps the lily?), but these few have long been our canonical flowers, the Shakespeares, Miltons, and Tolstoys of the plant world, voluminous and protean, the select company of flowers that have survived the vicissitudes of fashion to make themselves sovereign and unignorable.

So what sets these flowers apart from the run of charming daisies and pinks and carnations, not to mention the legions of pretty wildflowers? Perhaps more than anything else, it is their multifariousness. Some perfectly good flowers simply are what they are, singular and, if not completely fixed in their identity, capable of ringing only a few simple changes on it: hue, say, or petal count. Prod it all you want, select and cross and reengineer it, but there’s only so much a coneflower or a lotus is ever going to do. Fashion is apt to pick up such a flower for a time and then drop it—think of the pink, or gillyflower, in Shakespeare’s day or the hyacinth in Queen Victoria’s—since it won’t let itself be remade in some new image once its first one is passé.

By contrast, the rose, the orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather. The rose, flung open and ravishing in Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned herself up and turned prim for the Victorians. When the Dutch decided the paragon of floral beauty was a marbleized swirl of vividly contrasting colors, the petals of their tulips became extravagantly “feathered” and “flamed.” But then, when the English went in big for “carpet bedding” in the nineteenth century, the tulips duly allowed themselves to be turned into a paint box filled with the brightest, fattest dabs of pure pigment, suitable for massing. These are the sorts of flowers that bear our oddest notions gladly. Of course, their willingness to take part in the moving game of human culture has proven a brilliant strategy for their success, for there are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, than there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.

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It isn’t automatically obvious that the tulip belongs in this august company of flowers, probably because, in its modern incarnation, the tulip is such a simple, one-dimensional flower, and its rich history of being so much more than that has largely been lost. Compared to the rose or the peony, flowers whose historical forms survive alongside their modern incarnations (both because the plants are so long-lived and because they can be cloned indefinitely), the only way we have any idea what made a tulip beautiful in Turkish or Dutch or French eyes is through those people’s paintings and botanical illustrations. That’s because a tulip that falls out of favor soon goes extinct, since the bulbs don’t reliably come back every year. In general a strain won’t last unless it is regularly replanted, so the chain of genetic continuity can be broken in a generation. Even when people do continue to plant a particular tulip, the vigor of that variety (which is propagated by removing and planting the bulb’s “offsets,” the little, genetically identical bulblets that form at its base) eventually fades until it must be abandoned. Breeders today are busily seeking a new black tulip because they know the current standard-bearer—Queen of Night—is probably on her way out. Tulips, in other words, are mortal.

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No tulip appears in the flower-crowded borders of medieval tapestries, nor is the flower ever mentioned in the early “herbals”—the Old World encyclopedias of the world’s known plants and their uses. The fierceness of the passion that the tulip unleashed in Holland in the seventeenth century (and to a lesser extent in France and England) may have had something to do with the flower’s novelty in the West and the suddenness of its appearance. It is the youngest of our canonical flowers, the rose being the oldest.

Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word
tulip
is a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban.”) The fact that the tulip’s first official trip west took it from one court to another—that it was a flower favored by royalty—may also have contributed to its quick ascendancy, for court fashions have always been especially catching.

The tulip’s is not a case where a plant had to travel the world before its virtues could be recognized at home: by the time of Busbecq’s consignment, the tulip already had its own cult of admirers in the East, who had taken the flower a considerable distance from its form in the wild. There, it typically appears as a short, pretty, cheerful flower, a frank, open-faced, six-petaled star, often with a dramatic splotch of contrasting color at the base. Species tulips in Turkey typically come in red, less commonly in white or yellow. The Ottoman Turks had discovered that these wild tulips were great changelings, freely hybridizing (though it takes seven years before a tulip grown from seed flowers and shows its new colors) but also subject to mutations that produced spontaneous and wondrous changes in form and color. The tulip’s mutability was taken as a sign that nature cherished this flower above all others. In his 1597 herbal, John Gerard says of the tulip that “nature seems to plaie more with this flower, than with any other that I do know.”

The tulip’s genetic variability has in fact given nature—or, more precisely, natural selection—a great deal to play with. From among the chance mutations thrown out by a flower, nature preserves the rare ones that confer some advantage—brighter color, more perfect symmetry, whatever. For millions of years such features were selected, in effect, by the tulip’s pollinators—that is, insects—until the Turks came along and began to cast their own votes. (The Turks did not learn to make deliberate crosses till the 1600s; the novel tulips they prized were said simply to have “occurred.”) Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring. Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited us and our desires—even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty—to advance their own interests. Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.

In the environment of the Ottoman Empire the best way for a tulip to get ahead was to have absurdly long petals drawn to a point fine as a needle. In drawings, paintings, and ceramics (the only place the Turks’ ideal of tulip beauty survives; the human environment is an unstable one), these elongated blooms look as though they’d been stretched to the limit by a glassblower. The metaphor of choice for this form of tulip petal was the dagger. A successful Ottoman tulip also had to be pure in color and have smooth-edged petals held closely enough together to hide the anthers within, and it could never be “doubled”—have a superabundance of petals, in the way of a hybrid rose. Though these last traits are not uncommon in species tulips, attenuated petals are virtually unknown in the wild, which suggests that the Ottoman ideal of tulip beauty—elegant, sharp, and masculine—was freakish and hard-won and conferred no advantage in nature. (Very often traits that commend plants and animals to people render them less fit for life in the wild.) Beyond a certain point the Ottoman and insect ideals of tulip beauty no longer coincided.

For a time in the eighteenth century the bulbs of tulips that matched the Turkish ideal traded in Constantinople for quantities of gold. This was during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III, from 1703 to 1730, a period known to Turkish historians as the
lale devri,
or Tulip Era. The sultan was ruled by his passion for the flower, so much so that he imported bulbs by the millions from Holland, where the Dutch, after the passing of their own tulipomania, had become masters of large-scale bulb production. The extravagance of the sultan’s annual tulip festivals ultimately proved his downfall; the conspicuous waste of national treasure helped fire the revolt that ended his rule.

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed too wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan’s mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.

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A theft lies behind the rise of the tulip in Holland. One of the recipients of the first tulips to arrive in Europe was Carolus Clusius, a cosmopolitan plantsman who played a seminal role in the distribution of newly discovered plants through Europe. Bulbs were his specialty, and Clusius is credited with the introduction, or spread, of fritillarias, irises, hyacinths, anemones, ranunculi, narcissi, and lilies. The tulips came into Clusius’s hands because he was director of the Imperial Botanical Garden in Vienna. When he moved to Leiden to establish a new physic garden in 1593, he took some of the bulbs with him.

According to Anna Pavord’s history of the tulip, the flower was already growing, with little fanfare, in at least one Leiden garden by the time of Clusius’s arrival. But Clusius was so ostentatiously possessive of his rare tulips that he made the Dutch covet them, with disastrous consequences for his collection. In the words of one contemporary account, “No one could procure them, not even for money. [So] plans were made by which the best and most of his plants were stolen by night whereupon he lost courage and the desire to continue their cultivation; but those who had stolen the tulips lost no time in increasing them by sowing the seeds, and by this means the seventeen provinces were well stocked.”

Two things about this story are noteworthy. The first is that the stolen tulips were propagated by seed. Tulips, like apples, do not come true from seed—their offspring bear little resemblance to their parents. What this means is that, given the flower’s inherent variability, the seventeen provinces of Holland would have been “stocked” with an extraordinary array of differently shaped and colored tulips. This promiscuous seeding of tulips may well have been the source of much of the astounding variety the Dutch managed to coax from the flower, a botanical treasure that became a point of national pride in the seventeenth century. Holland’s tulips were mentioned in the same breath as its invincible navy and unparalleled republican liberties.

The second noteworthy point about the story is that it puts a theft at the source of Holland’s long, illustrious, and ignominious relationship with the tulip. (This was not the first or last time a theft attended the appearance of a new plant; the potato might never have prospered in France if not for a similar theft from the royal gardens of Louis XVI.) Very often in myth a theft, and its consequence of shame, lies at the root of a human achievement—think of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the sun or Eve’s tasting of the fruit of knowledge. Shame seems to be the going price of achievement, particularly the achievement of knowledge or beauty. For the Dutch, at least, shame has shadowed the tulip’s story from the start, though fainter manifestations of the same shadow are probably never far from the culture of flowers. It’s there in the wastefulness and extravagance we often associate with flowers, in the sensual pleasure we take in them, in our satisfaction at forcing them beyond their natural forms and colors and blooming times, even in the tiny pang that can accompany the petty theft of a flower that’s been cut and brought indoors.

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The modern tulip has become such a cheap and ubiquitous commodity that it’s hard for us to recover a sense of the glamour that once surrounded the flower. That glamour surely had something to do with its roots in the Orient—Anna Pavord speaks of the “intoxicating aura of the infidels” that surrounded the tulip. There was, too, the preciousness of the early tulips, the supply of which could be increased only very slowly through offsets, a quirk of biology that kept supply well behind demand. In France in 1608, a miller exchanged his mill for a bulb of Mère Brune. Around the same time a bridegroom accepted a single tulip as the whole of his dowry—happily, we are told; the variety became known as “Mariage de ma fille.”

Yet tulipomania in France and England never reached the pitch it would in Holland. How can the mad embrace of these particular people and this particular flower be explained?