Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  As the price of tulips continued to rise, market forces intruded rudely on a trade that had previously operated according to the rules of friendship. Now practically everybody was selling flowers, and the rich were buying them from artisans not from love but to flaunt them before their friends. Profoundly depressed, Clusius unburdened himself to a fellow humanist, Justus Lipsius:

  To hell with those who started all this buying and selling! I have always kept a garden, sometimes for my own pleasure, sometimes so that I might serve my friends, who, I saw, took pleasure in that pursuit. But now, when I see all these worthless people, sometimes even those whose names I have never heard, so impudent in their requests, sometimes I feel like giving up my pastime altogether.

  Whatever his private feelings, Clusius the plantsman-scholar continued to search for new tulip varieties and possible new uses for them. Remembering his failed attempt to test the aphrodisiac properties of tulip bulbs – the Viennese apothecary to whom he had entrusted his bulbs forgot to candy them like orchid roots before attempting his experiments – he was pleased to report that the apothecary Johan Müller had at last candied some tulip bulbs for a similar experiment, outcome unknown, although their taste was reported to be much more palatable than orchid roots. (John Parkinson tried the same experiment on himself but claimed not to have eaten enough to judge their ‘Venereous quality’.)

  Disenchanted by the tulip trade’s increasing commercialization, Clusius turned his attention to wild tulips, which he included in his great masterwork of 1601: fragrant tulips from the Apennines (Tulipa sylvestris); from Narbonne in southern France (T. sylvestris subsp. sylvestris, collected by Matthias de L’Obel and sent to his friends in the Netherlands); from Spain (T. sylvestris subsp. australis from the mountains near Aranjuez, sent to the Netherlands by the king of Spain’s gardener); and from Byzantium, assumed to be the little Cretan tulip, T. saxatilis, which came to him with the inscription ‘Lalé di suoi fiori’. Clusius’s final tulips appeared in 1611, two years after his death. Fittingly, they included the wild Persian tulip that bears his name, Tulipa clusiana, sent to him first in the form of a portrait and then as a bulblet by the Italian plant lover Matteo Caccini, who had a fine botanical garden in Florence. Imported originally from Persia, its flower was exceptionally delicate, slightly larger than the Narbonne or Spanish tulips, of a soft red on the outside but snowy white inside, its outer tepals long and pointed, the inner ones somewhat more rounded. A second – more expensive – Persian tulip bulb sent by Caccini produced a single leaf, which soon withered, and when Clusius lifted the bulb in May he found it quite flabby and empty.

  Yet despite such setbacks, Clusius retained his trust in the extraordinary diversity of the plant world. ‘Although it looks as if the pursuit of botany had reached its zenith,’ he wrote when introducing his Persian tulip, ‘yet almost every day we get knowledge of some new plant which nobody has described so far; so endless is this study.’

  WHILE PROTO-BOTANISTS WERE celebrating the glories of the natural world, miniaturists such as Joris Hoefnagel were busy turning flowers into art. The son of a wealthy Antwerp diamond merchant, Hoefnagel moved to Frankfurt in 1591, joining the circle of Netherlandish artists and intellectuals who had gathered there around Clusius. Flowers developed into a major feature of Hoefnagel’s work, as they did for many European artists. The tulip’s rapid rise can be tracked through the increasingly fashionable florilegia designed to show off the botanic collections of their patrons – Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis for the Prince Bishop of Eichstätt, for instance, and Pierre Vallet’s book of flowers growing in the French king’s garden – and to meet rich collectors’ developing taste for exotic flora and fauna.

  One of the most celebrated of the new florilegia was Hortus Floridus by Crispin de Passe the Younger, published originally in Latin in 1614 and soon afterwards in French, Dutch and English. Most plates show the plants growing in a flat Dutch landscape against a plain sky; the view point is so low the artist seems to be lying on his stomach. A hand-coloured copy once owned by the great English botanist Sir Joseph Banks includes a fine yellow-and-red tulip named after John Gerard.

  ALTHOUGH BRITAIN RECEIVED her tulips slightly later than continental Europe, their impact was no less dramatic. From the same John Gerard you catch a sense of wonder at the novelty and diversity of this ‘strang and forraine flower’, with which all the ‘studious and painefull [painstaking] Herbarists’ wanted to become better acquainted. According to Gerard, one of the first to grow tulips in England was the apothecary James Garrett of London’s Lime Street, home to a community of flower lovers, many of Flemish or Huguenot origin, which included the silk merchant James Cole and Matthias de L’Obel when he returned to live permanently in the capital. Clusius stayed here during his visits to London in the 1570s and 1580s, perhaps bringing some of the tulips that James Garrett planted in his garden near the city walls at Aldgate. Garrett’s aim was to map the entire genus by sowing and planting tulips of his own propagation, together with those received from friends overseas, but after twenty years he gave up as new colours arose at each new planting; to describe them individually, said Gerard, would be like rolling Sisyphus’ stone, or counting grains of sand.

  Gerard nonetheless made a brave attempt to describe seven main sorts then flowering in Britain, including the Bologna tulip, the French tulip, the yellow tulip, various red-and-white tulips, one coloured like apple blossom, along with countless other sorts mentioned by Matthias de L’Obel. Thomas Johnson, the apothecary of Snow Hill in London, shied away from describing tulips altogether when he revised Gerard’s herbal some thirty-five years later, directing his readers to the European florilegia of Johann Theodor de Bry, Emanuel Sweert, and the French king’s gardener Jean Robin, and to the book of garden flowers by his fellow apothecary, John Parkinson. Tulips were garden flowers without medical significance, although Johnson noted that their bulbs could be preserved with sugar or otherwise dressed and were neither unpleasant nor offensive, ‘but rather good and nourishing’.

  Writing specifically for gentlewomen, whose ‘love & liking’ of flowers was born of their leisure, Parkinson’s splendid book on garden flowers gave tulips a central role in his frontispiece of the Garden of Eden and in his text, where they appear between lilies and daffodils, sharing a little of both their natures. In all, he identified some 140 different sorts of tulip, ‘found out in these later dayes by many of the searchers of natures varieties, . . . our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarities of these pleasant delights, then any age I thinke before’. Many of the early-flowering varieties he identified by place of origin: Caffa, Bologna, Italy, France, Crete, Armenia, Constantinople and Clusius’s rare Persian tulip, which he had seen only recently. He mentions, too, a white tulip shown to him by his friend John Tradescant, who would shortly take up his post as keeper of the royal gardens, vines and silkworms at Oatlands Palace for Charles I and his French wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.

  From Tradescant, we gain a sense of how tulips were entering British gardens. While not especially renowned as a tulip fancier, the elder Tradescant bought 800 tulip bulbs in Haarlem and 500 more in Brussels when he travelled through the Low Countries and northern France buying vast quantities of plants and trees for his then master Robert Cecil, Lord Treasurer of England, who was busy creating a fine new garden at Hatfield House. The year was 1611, two decades before the onset of tulip mania, and the tulips cost him ten shillings a hundred, far less than the rare Martagon lilies and irises he also bought in Brussels, or the twenty-six shillings he spent on two pots of gilly-flowers and one pot of seed. He later acquired more tulips for his own garden at South Lambeth, dutifully recording their names in his copy of Parkinson’s book of garden flowers, now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, including a ‘Tulipe Caffa’ sent to him by Sir Peter Wyche, ambassador at Constantinople. Like Thomas Johnson, he passed over individual tulip names in his garden catalogue, merely listing ‘a great variety of elegant tulip
s’ and ‘50 sorts of tulips, variously flamed’.

  Aided by Elias Ashmole, Tradescant’s son John was at least able to name thirty different varieties among his many other ‘gallant Tulips’; five of these were painted by his friend Alexander Marshal, a merchant and gentleman of independent fortune as well as a keen horticulturist, entomologist and amateur artist of rare talent. Marshal stayed with the younger Tradescant at South Lambeth in 1641, making daily visits to Oatlands Palace and doubtless already at work on his ‘Booke of Mr. TRADESCANT’s choicest Flowers and Plants, exquisitely limned [painted] in vellum’. That album is now lost but Marshal’s own florilegium survives, with its five tulips also grown by Tradescant, the purple-and-white ‘Zebulom’ and four prized red-and-white varieties: ‘Admiral de Man’, ‘Louis of Portugal’, ‘Agate Robin’ and ‘Pas Citadel’.

  Another admirer of this last variety was the Welsh florist Sir Thomas Hanmer, who began the Civil War fighting for King Charles I but later obtained permission to take his family to France. After his wife died in Paris, Hanmer returned to England, married again and settled at Bettisfield in the Welsh Marches, where the local soil and air killed off most of his rare tulips. He lamented their fate to his good friend the diarist John Evelyn, eight years his junior, whom he advised on planting the flower garden of his Deptford home, Sayes Court, and to whom he sent roots and bulbs, including tulips.

  Despite his personal loss, Hanmer commended the tulip as ‘the Queene of Bulbous plants, whose Flower is beautifull in its figure, and most rich and admirable in colours, and wonderfull in variety of markings’. To fill his days of enforced leisure under Commonwealth rule, he poured his love of plants and gardening into a Garden Book, finished in manuscript by 1659 but left unpublished for nearly three centuries. Supplemented with notes from his pocket book, it opens a window onto a beautifully preserved, mid-seventeenth-century garden, packed with all the latest flowers, and catching fashions on the point of change.

  Like Parkinson, Hanmer selected only the brightest and best of his beloved tulips, describing their gradations of colour in words that are now all but lost to the language: amaranthe (purple), aurora (deep orange), bertino (blue-grey), furille-mort (dead-leaf colour), gilvus (very pale red), grideline (flax grey), isabella (greyish yellow), minimme (dun colour), murrey (mulberry), quoist or queest (dove grey), and watchet (sky blue). At first in England, he tells us, gardeners valued only pure white tulips striped with purples and reds, but French tastes had crept in and now ‘we esteeme (as the French doe) any mixtures of odde colours, though there bee no white with them, and such as are markt with any yellowes or Isabellas are much priz’d; all which new colour’d Tulipes wee call Modes, being the fashion, yet new flowers with good Purples or Violets and White are still very deare and valuable’.

  As John Evelyn explained, it was not the amount of colour that brought fame to a tulip, but rather the quality, vivacity, mix and position of the varied shades, ‘in the botomes, strakes & forme’, which all had to follow certain rules known as Transcendents: that the colours should be evenly laid, splendid, perfect and distinct inside and out, placed so ‘that one kill not & obscure the other but add luster rather to it like a good piece of painting’. It was important, too, that the streaks, known by the French word ‘panache’, should start at the bottom and extend up to the brim like a shell.

  Hanmer clearly had the gift of friendship as well as gardening. In dedicating his Flora to Hanmer, John Rea called him the ‘truly Noble, and perfect Lover of Ingenuity’, explaining that Hanmer had first brought to England the gallant tulip named after him, ‘Agate Hanmer’, ‘a beautiful Flower, of three good colours, pale gredeline, deep scarlet, and pure white, commonly well parted, striped, agoted, and excellently placed, abiding constant to the last, with the bottom and Tamis [anthers] blew’. Hanmer’s friendships even crossed enemy lines, for in June 1655 he sent a ‘very great mother-root of Agate Hanmer’ to another renowned tulip fancier, Cromwell’s Major-General John Lambert, who had bought Queen Henrietta Maria’s fine Italianate villa and garden at Wimbledon. Hanmer entrusted the mission to ‘Rose’, presumably John Rose who gardened for King Charles II after the Restoration, and he repeated his gift of tulips the following year, sending the general fine varieties such as ‘Belle Susanne’ and ‘Belle Isabelle’.

  In his garden at Bettisfield, Hanmer grew his tulips in four little bordered beds in the midst of a bordered knot, planting them carefully in rows, together with jonquils, narcissi, fritillarias, anemones, gillyflowers, cyclamen, irises raised from seed by John Rea, spring crocuses, hyacinths, polyanthas and one double crown imperial. His instructions for growing tulips show equal care, covering the best kinds of earth (one part sand and two parts willow earth, or two parts rich mould from the fields and a little cow dung, rotted and sieved); planting beds (slightly mounded, no more than four feet across to allow weeding and viewing); and weather protection (linen cloths supported on wooden frames). The cloths could be pulled aside to admit sunshine and proper viewing: ‘And now the Florists fly about to see and examine and take the chiefe pleasure of gardens, admiring the new varietyes that Spring produces, and being impatient of delays open the very buttons scarce yet coloured, but with a little sticke or two for the purpose, lest they should prejudice them with the touch of their fingers.’

  20. The Parliamentarian Major-General John Lambert’s love of the tulip is here lampooned in a pack of playing cards produced by Royalist exiles in the Netherlands.

  SIR THOMAS HANMER may have developed his love of tulips in France, which exhibited a peculiarly Gallic form of tulip fever well before the mania erupted in Holland, and which remained largely unscathed by its aftershocks. France produced one of the first treatises devoted exclusively to tulips, the Traitté compendieux et abregé des tulippes et de leurs diverses sortes et espèces (Paris, 1617), which claimed that nature had tried to outdo herself in creating each beautiful variety. It is said that in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, single tulip bulbs changed hands for the price of thriving businesses (a brewery valued at 30,000 francs, for instance), and were welcomed as dowries by prospective sons-in-law. More tulip treatises followed throughout the century, repeatedly crowning the tulip Reine des fleurs or Queen of Flowers and making wild claims about its growing popularity. Most bombastic of all was Charles de la Chesnée Monstereul’s Le Floriste François of 1654, which focused exclusively on tulips as if these were the only flowers worth growing. Having erroneously given the tulip a Sinhalese origin, the author attributed its lack of smell to its transportation from warm to colder climates; had it retained its scent, he declared, the tulip would have united all the perfections of the floral kingdom. And once the Portuguese had given it to the Flemish, the French – ‘adoring these terrestrial divinities’ – took it home with them and, being ‘more curious spirits than any other nation’, had found the means to perfect it.

  Tulips undoubtedly made a fine show in French gardens as their numbers swelled, from the two dozen varieties singled out by the first tulip treatise of 1617, to La Chesnée Monstereul’s total of 450 by mid-century. One of the best-stocked gardens belonged to Pierre Morin from the extended family of Parisian nurserymen who supplied plants to curious gardeners throughout Europe, including the Tradescants at South Lambeth. John Evelyn visited at least twice, finding much to admire: Morin’s oval garden, which he copied for Sayes Court; his rare collections of shells, flowers and insects; and his plantings of tulips, anemones, ranunculuses and crocuses, all of which Evelyn judged to be ‘of the most exquisite’ and ‘held for the rarest in the World’, drawing crowds of like-minded admirers throughout the season. On a return visit in 1651, Morin told him ‘there were 10000 sorts of Tulips onely’, although whether he meant in his garden or in general is not clear. Morin listed a hundred named tulips in his plant catalogues, the rarest of his stock. Customers with shallower pockets were assured that he had many lesser varieties for sale at a fair price.

  EUROPE’S TULIP MANIA bel
ongs most surely to the Dutch, however, who let their normally phlegmatic nature run away with them, attracted on the one hand by the extraordinary – and extraordinarily capricious – beauty of this Turkish wonder flower, and on the other by the prospect of untold wealth, after rare tulips had caught the imagination of connoisseurs and collectors, and their prices, already high, began inexorably to rise.

  The story has been well told by others, among them Anna Pavord’s The Tulip, Mike Dash’s Tulipomania, Deborah Moggach’s fictionalized Tulip Fever and most recently Anne Goldgar’s painstakingly researched Tulipmania, which calls into question several cherished myths about what exactly happened, and why. It is hard to ignore parallels between the increasingly unhinged tulip market of seventeenth-century Holland and the packaging of complex financial derivatives that triggered the global economic crash of 2008. By the time tulip mania peaked in 1637, bulbs were traded, sight unseen and frequently unowned, to buyers without the money to pay for them but who hoped to sell them on at ever more astronomical prices. It was a market in futures that had lost all connection with reality; a ‘windhandel’, they called it at the time – a trade in wind.

  But there is no doubting the extraordinary beauty of the tulips then in vogue. For all their Calvinist leanings, the Dutch had long nurtured a love of flowers, and of paintings that celebrated the pleasures of the physical world. Travellers such as keen-eyed Peter Mundy, an employee of the East India Company, were delighted by their little gardens and flowerpots stuffed with rare bulbs and flowers, and by the paintings hanging in the shops of quite ordinary tradesmen. Tulips brought these two loves together; and the tulip’s rise coincided fortuitously with the perfection of the new genre of flower painting by artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Ambrosius Bosschaert and his sons, Roelandt Savery and Daniel Seghers. Outlandish and strange, their tulips appear bathed in a seductive sheen, often placed at the all-important top right-hand corner of the composition and mixed with flowers from different seasons. Although the models were real, sketched in gardens because the artists could not afford to purchase the rarest blooms, these are exercises in horticultural fantasy like the tulip trade itself. And for householders who could no longer afford the flowers, a painting by all but the highest rung of flower painters was almost certainly more affordable.