Tulipomania (9 page)

Even in Clusius’s day it was obvious that something strange was happening to the tulips grown in Leiden and elsewhere. A bulb that one year had produced a unicolored tulip might become a Rosen or a Bizarden the next. This process was known as “breaking,” and the bulb of a flower that had undergone the process was said to be “broken” while those that remained unicolored were called “breeders.” The whole process was extremely unpredictable. There was no way of telling if or when a flower would break; one tulip might bloom in the spring with a dazzling new array of colors, while another, of the same variety and planted next to the first in the same flower bed, remained quite unaffected. Breaking was common in some years, less so in others. Similarly, a broken bulb might—albeit rarely—produce an offset that turned out to be a breeder, and no grower could be sure that a breeder bulb would not break. The only certainties seemed to be that tulips grown from seed were invariably breeders and that, once broken, a mother bulb would never again produce a unicolored flower.

There were clues here to the nature of the disease, and Clusius was a careful enough observer to notice that broken tulips were slightly smaller and definitely weaker than the flowers produced by breeder bulbs. But at a time when the mechanisms by which diseases are communicated remained unguessed at, the phenomenon of breaking seemed akin to magic to most of his contemporaries. Try as they might, growers could not force a breeder bulb to break when they wanted it to. Some turned to alchemical potions made of pigeon dung, which they applied to the bulbs; others tried cutting the bulbs of two different-colored tulips in two and binding the opposing halves together in the hope of producing a flower sporting both colors. These devices rarely had the desired effect.

Exactly when the tulip became infected with a virus is not certain. The earliest observations of the phenomenon date to about 1580, but the disease was probably older than that. In truth the plant became vulnerable to disease as soon as it entered a garden; any flowers raised in artificial proximity by humans face threats they do not encounter in the wild. Cultivars may be poorly cared for or discarded in favor of some new favorite, but in particular they can pick up diseases to which the more robust botanical species have developed an immunity or that at least spread more slowly in the wild.

The mystery of breaking remained unsolved until well into the twentieth century, when the agent that causes the disease, sometimes called the mosaic virus, was finally identified by staff at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London. By permitting aphids to feed on broken bulbs and then on breeders, they were able to show that the breeder bulbs visited by the aphids broke twice as often as a control sample—thus simultaneously proving that the disease was caused by a virus and demonstrating the mechanism whereby it was transmitted from one tulip to another. Further experimentation showed that the mosaic virus could infect both a flower when it was growing in a garden and a bulb that was being stored prior to planting. Perhaps ironically, given the efforts of old Dutch growers to induce breaking by binding half-bulbs together, the method used at the John Innes Institute to persuade aphids to feed alternately on infected and uninfected tulips was to graft halves of broken bulbs onto breeders.

Well before Clusius’s death, the broken tulips he grew in his private garden at Leiden were attracting the attention of connoisseurs eager to secure specimens of these unique new flowers for their own gardens. The old botanist soon found himself almost overwhelmed with requests for tulip bulbs. Many, he knew, came from people who merely
wanted to follow the fashion for the flower and had no real interest in botany and no idea how to cultivate bulbs; others were from people he suspected of planning to sell his bulbs for whatever they could get. In any case, his own supplies were not remotely adequate to meet the demand. “So many ask for them,” he wrote to his friend Justus Lipsius, a humanist scholar who had been one of the pillars of Leiden University in its formative years, “that if I were to satisfy every demand, I would be completely robbed of my treasures, and others would be rich.”

Unfortunately for Clusius, some at least of those who implored him for bulbs would not take no for an answer. Just as he had been in Vienna, he began to be plagued by repeated thefts from his garden. Twice during the summer of 1596 and again in the spring of 1598, thieves stole tulip bulbs from him while he was away. The total loss must have been substantial, because we know from Clusius’s surviving letters that more than a hundred bulbs were taken in just one of these raids. The old man was so distressed by the loss—and by the familiar disinterest that the authorities at Leiden showed in investigating the thefts—that he vowed to give up gardening altogether and disperse the rest of his collection among his friends.

Over the years Clusius’s reputation has suffered from the suggestion made by one contemporary chronicler that these thefts occurred because he asked an exorbitant price for his flowers and stubbornly refused to hand over bulbs to anyone who would not meet it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout his long career the botanist showed great generosity in sending samples of his finds to friends for nothing—
“con amore,”
as he sometimes put it in his letters—and the only people he refused to supply were those he suspected would not value his gifts. The people who organized the theft of his bulbs at Leiden fell into the latter category, and Clusius was surely right to suspect their motives from the start.

Nevertheless, the thefts did have one positive result. Clusius’s tulips were far from the only ones in the United Provinces in the 1590s, but his collection was certainly the most varied and the best. As a result of the thefts these precious bulbs were distributed throughout the Netherlands, north and south, and they flourished. In some of their new homes, at least, they must have become parents of new hybrids, varieties that in their turn bred and formed an important part of the stock of bulbs traded in the next century. The Leiden bulbs thus became the progenitors of the flowers traded later in the century, and thanks in part to them, in the words of a chronicler, “the seventeen provinces were amply stocked.”

T
he spectacular colors and endless variations of the tulip marked it from its first discovery as an exceptional flower. There was general agreement on this point, not only between Turks and Dutchmen but also among botanists of every nationality, and by 1600 it had been widely acclaimed throughout Europe. The tulip, the French horticulturalist Monstereul wrote a little later, was supreme among flowers in the same way that humans were lords of the animals, diamonds eclipsed all other precious stones, and the sun ruled the stars. That judgment, to a seventeenth-century mind, said something important about the tulip. If humans were God’s chosen creatures, then the tulip was surely God’s chosen flower.

The popularity of the new flower was such that garden lovers soon began to strive to outdo each other by producing ever more dazzling and brilliantly colored varieties. Thanks in part to the work of Clusius and his circle of correspondents, a good number of different
hybrids were now available; to the tulips of the Netherlands and the dozens of varieties produced by James Garret in England must be added the forty-one French cultivars cataloged by the botanist Mathias Lobelius and uncounted others elsewhere; certainly many more than one hundred in 1600, and one thousand (of which at least five hundred were Dutch) by the 1630s. The latter total compares remarkably favorably to the 2,500 or so species produced by the mid-eighteenth century and the 5,000 cultivars recognized today.

Nevertheless, the number of bulbs available at the turn of the century remained somewhat limited. Most of the new varieties had so far produced only a handful of tulips, and largely for this reason, the flower remained the passion of the privileged few. It was grown principally by rich connoisseurs, who valued it for its beauty and the intensity of its colors. These men traded prized flowers among themselves, but because they were, almost without exception, wealthy in their own right, they only rarely cared to make substantial profits from these exchanges.

By the end of the sixteenth century small groups of tulip connoisseurs existed throughout Europe. They could be found in the city-states of northern Italy, in England, and in the empire. But thanks largely to the early introduction of the tulip to the southern Netherlands, the largest concentration of enthusiasts were to be found in the Low Countries among the members of the Flemish nobility and gentry. Many of these connoisseurs had obtained their first bulbs from Carolus Clusius and his companions. Clusius’s colleague Lobelius published a list of them in 1581; they included Marie de Brimeu and her husband the duke of Aerschot, who had a fine garden at their home in The Hague; Joris Rye of Mechelen, and Clusius’s lifelong friend Jean de Brancion.

From the Netherlands the tulip soon spread south to France, where the soil of Picardy was well suited to the cultivation of bulbs.
Around 1610 there was a craze for flowers in Paris, and fashionable nobles began competing with each other to present the ladies of the French court with the rarest and most spectacular specimens they could find. When the idea first caught on, most of the blooms exchanged in this way were roses, which had been, for several centuries, by far the most popular garden flowers. But the nobles of the French court found in the tulip something capable of surpassing the reigning empress of the garden. The subtle elegance of the flower—not to mention its novelty and rarity—quickly established it as the new favorite of the court. The fashion for tulips seems to have raged at least until the wedding of the young king Louis XIII in 1615, where aristocratic ladies wore cut flowers as an adornment to the cleavage, pinned to the plunging necklines of their low-cut dresses, and the most beautiful varieties are said to have been as highly esteemed as diamonds. The Dutch horticulturalist Abraham Munting, writing later in the century, recorded that at the height of the French craze a single tulip of especial beauty—and a cut flower, not a bulb—changed hands for the equivalent of a thousand Dutch guilders.

Of course, the nobles of the court soon sought new diversions. But their enthusiasm for the tulip had important consequences, for Parisian society, even in the seventeenth century, was renowned throughout Europe for its elegance and style, and the fashions of the court were taken up and followed elsewhere. Indeed, they often continued to flourish in the backwaters of the continent long after the French themselves had moved on to some other craze, and it was not at all uncommon for visitors to the west of Ireland or the forests of Lithuania to find the ladies there dressed in styles that Paris had discarded ten or twenty years before. The passion for tulips that swept through the court of Louis XIII for a few short years thus did much to ensure that the flower would be looked on with high favor throughout the continent for decades to come.

The first people to follow the fashion of the French court were the French themselves. Shortly after the tulip became popular in Paris, a miniature mania for the flower took place in northern France. There are, unfortunately, no contemporary sources of information about this episode, which by all accounts foreshadowed what was later to occur in the United Provinces. If later reports are to be believed, however, the passion for tulips was such that in about 1608 a miller exchanged his mill for a single specimen of a variety called Mere Brune, and another enthusiast handed over a brewery valued at thirty thousand francs in return for one bulb of the hybrid Tulipe Brasserie. A third account of the same episode tells of a bride whose dowry consisted of one solitary bulb of a new Rosen tulip, which her father had bred and named, with due sense of occasion, Marriage de Ma Fille. (The groom of this tale is supposed to have been delighted by the magnificence of the gift.)

These stories may be apocryphal. It is, however, certain that the fashion for tulips soon spread through the rest of Europe. By 1620 the flower was nowhere more popular than in the United Provinces, where it quickly eclipsed rivals such as the lily and the carnation. Tulips began to be cultivated throughout the republic, where they were admired by an increasing number of knowledgeable connoisseurs and grown in a profusion of varieties from Rotterdam in the south of the country to Groningen in the north.

The initial impetus for the long-standing Dutch enthusiasm for tulips was provided by the flood of refugees and immigrants who poured across the borders of the United Provinces from the southern Netherlands at intervals throughout the Dutch Revolt. Tens of thousands of Protestants living in the Spanish lands fled north in order to keep their religion and escape intermittent bouts of persecution. In some instances the influx of immigrants more than doubled the size of Dutch towns; 28,000 refugees arrived in Leiden between 1581 and
1621, and the total population quadrupled from 12,000 to 45,000, while in Amsterdam, throughout the seventeenth century, the majority of men marrying within the city walls had not been born there. The immigrants were willing to work hard, and they often had capital to invest, substantially adding to the sum total of Dutch prosperity. The majority were capable artisans who could contribute useful skills—the foundation of the famous Amsterdam diamond trade was directly attributable to immigrants from Antwerp—but among their numbers were many of the wealthiest merchants of great towns such as Brussels and Antwerp. These men included a number of early enthusiasts for the tulip who brought their bulbs with them, introducing many new varieties to the United Provinces. By swelling the number of bulbs in cultivation, the refugees must also have made the flower significantly more widely available than it had once been.