Tulipomania_ The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused

Chapter 2

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An Adornment to the Cleavage.

The 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 G.o.d"s chosen creatures, then the tulip was surely G.o.d"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 pa.s.sion of the privileged few. It was grown princ.i.p.ally 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 n.o.bility 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 n.o.bles 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 n.o.bles of the French court found in the tulip something capable of surpa.s.sing 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 n.o.bles 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 Bra.s.serie. 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.

But the tulip was not popular just among immigrants; many Dutchmen were also becoming pa.s.sionate about the flower. In the United Provinces, unlike the rest of Europe, tulip connoisseurs were rarely aristocrats; the n.o.bility of the northern Netherlands, which had controlled the country for hundreds of years, had been largely wiped out in the Spanish wars. They were, rather, members of the new ruling cla.s.s of the republic-a group of rich and influential private citizens whom the Dutch called "regents."

The regents of a Dutch city typically included particularly well-to-do second-or third-generation businessmen, some lawyers, and perhaps a physician. As a rule they were wealthy enough to live by investing their money in bonds, foreign trade, or closer to home, one of the many profitable schemes for reclaiming land from the sea or draining lakes and marshes to create new farmland. They were thus freed from the day-to-day cares of earning a living and formed a self-perpetuating ruling cla.s.s whose members filled the princ.i.p.al posts in the provincial parliaments and town councils.

The few Dutch connoisseurs who were not regents were rich merchants, some of whom were at least as wealthy as their compatriots, but who nevertheless earned their living by taking an active part in the running of some business or other. The men of this cla.s.s were generally accorded an honorific t.i.tle that recognized their particular calling-so that a man named, for example, de Jonge who was involved in the fisheries would be known as "Seigneur de Jonge in Herring"-and they tended to reinvest the profits they made in their own businesses. They had less time for their gardens than did the regents, but even so, a number of the richest merchants did become noted tulip lovers.

The flower was, in fact, perfectly suited to the United Provinces. It was not only fashionable and far more delicately colored than other garden plants; it was also unusually hardy, which meant that novices as well as expert horticulturalists could grow it successfully. The bulbs, moreover, flourished best in poor, sandy soils of the sort found in several parts of the republic and particularly in Holland, where a belt of dry, white earth ran parallel with the coast all the way from Leiden up to the city of Haarlem, just to the west of Amsterdam, and then on to Alkmaar, at the northern tip of the province.

What mattered most, however, was the tulip"s new status as a symbol of wealth and good taste. Beginning in about 1600 the United Provinces became, quite unexpectedly, by far the richest country in Europe. For more than half a century enormous sums of money poured into the country, greatly expanding the ranks of wealthy merchants. These men could afford to spend lavishly on things of beauty.

A number of contemporary writers have preserved the names of some of the wealthy Dutch connoisseurs who collected tulips in the first decades of the seventeenth century. They include several of the richest and most influential people in Holland-men such as Paulus van Beresteyn of Haarlem, who was once the regent of the local leper house, and who grew tulips within the city walls; and Jacques de Gheyn, a wealthy painter from The Hague. De Gheyn was a well-known patrician and an acquaintance of Clusius"s who was sufficiently pa.s.sionate about gardening to complete a volume of flower paintings, twenty-two pages long, that he sold to the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II. He was one of the few well-off connoisseurs whose real wealth is known with some accuracy, since he had his capital formally a.s.sessed in 1627, two years before his death. This audit showed he was then worth no less than forty thousand guilders.

Another tulipophile whose name figures in old records was far wealthier than van Beresteyn and de Gheyn together. Indeed, Guillelmo Bartolotti van de Heuvel (who was actually thoroughly Dutch and owed his bizarre name to the fact that he had been adopted by a childless uncle from Bologna) was one of the two richest men in all Amsterdam, and with a.s.sets worth a staggering 400,000 guilders in total, he was quite probably the wealthiest private individual ever to partic.i.p.ate in the tulip trade. Having built his fortune in trade, van de Heuvel could afford to devote his leisure time to cultivating a celebrated garden right in the center of Amsterdam. From the scant descriptions that have survived, it appears it was laid out to a highly symmetrical and fiercely formal plan. Almost certainly it would have been the garden of a true connoisseur, following the contemporary fashion for flowers to be planted one to a bed so they could be admired in splendid isolation.

The vast influx of wealth that made a rich man of Guillelmo van de Heuvel was primarily a consequence of the Dutch Revolt. In the previous century, the republic"s largest town, Amsterdam, had been a city of only modest importance, while Antwerp, in the southern part of the Netherlands, was both the largest port and the wealthiest town in Europe. Huge quant.i.ties of goods from the Baltic, Spain, and the Americas pa.s.sed through the city on their way to the Holy Roman Empire and the other states of northern Europe. But with the seizure of Flushing by the Sea Beggars in the first days of the rebellion, the Dutch were able to cut off much of the city"s commerce by blocking the mouth of the river Scheldt, which gave Antwerp its access to the sea. The blockade was a catastrophe for the Flemish town. Much of its considerable trade was diverted north to Holland, where Amsterdam became the princ.i.p.al beneficiary.

At about the same time the Dutch broke what had previously been a Spanish monopoly by opening trading links with the East Indies. To Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Indies were a source of almost unimaginable wealth. They overflowed with luxury goods, from spices to Chinese porcelain, which could not be obtained elsewhere. These goods could be purchased relatively cheaply in the East and were hardly bulky, yet they could earn a fortune at home. A single cargo of spices was worth many times more than the same tonnage of timber, grain, or salt-the commodities on which the Netherlands had long depended-and could be turned into spectacular profits if brought safely home.

Dutch merchants were quick to recognize the potential of trading with the East. By 1610 they had established outposts on a number of Indonesian islands, and despite the constant threat of Spanish attack, fleets laden with peppercorns and nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, silks, and dyestuffs were sailing regularly to the United Provinces. The merchants of Amsterdam called these new commodities the "rich trades," and with good reason.

The surplus of wealth that now surged into the republic-a single voyage to the Indies could yield profits of up to 400 percent-touched the lives of thousands of Netherlanders. By 1631 fully five-sixths of Amsterdam"s richest three hundred citizens had a stake in the rich trades, and both the Dutch merchant cla.s.s and the regents who backed them and invested in their enterprises were enormously better off, on average, than their contemporaries in England, France, or the empire.

By the standards of the time the most successful Dutch merchants were astonishingly wealthy. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a trader of the middle rank might have thought himself comfortable if his income reached 1,500 guilders a year and well off if it topped 3,000, while those below him in the social scale-clerks, shop owners, and others with some claim to the t.i.tle "gentleman"-earned on average a third or a fifth as much: perhaps 500 to 1,000 guilders a year. But for men such as van de Heuvel, who had substantial stakes in the rich trades, incomes of 10,000, 20,000, even 30,000 guilders a year were possible. The richest of the lot was Jacob Poppen, the son of a German immigrant who had built his fortune trading with the Indies and with Russia. He was worth 500,000 guilders when he died in 1624. Adriaen Pauw, a regent who became burgomaster of Amsterdam and eventually one of the most prominent politicians of the United Provinces, ama.s.sed a fortune of 350,000 guilders from his successful investments, and by the 1630s another ten Amsterdammers possessed 300,000 guilders or more.

Today men of comparable wealth dress in the finest clothes and travel by private jet and limousine. But even at the height of the Dutch Golden Age, visitors to the republic found it hard to distinguish the wealthiest members of the regent and merchant cla.s.ses from their countrymen. Even the richest of them dressed in clothes of the most severely unadorned variety, following the national fashion for large, wide-brimmed hats, tight trousers, and a heavy jacket. Underneath they sported a doublet, resembling a waistcoat-all in black-with substantial white ruffs at the throat and wrist, knee stockings, and tight black shoes, while their wives and daughters dressed in drab bodices and floor-length dresses, over which a lace ap.r.o.n often appeared. In winter, to keep out the pervasive Low Countries chill, men and women alike donned elegant fur-lined dressing gowns that were worn over all the other clothing at home and at the place of work, but otherwise it was customary to avoid any sort of display of wealth. Women rarely even displayed their hair, preferring to hide it under a tight white cap, and though Dutch men did style theirs in something approaching Cavalier fashion-long and curled at the shoulders, with mustaches and a small triangle of neatly trimmed beard-on the whole the national dress sense was resoundingly Puritan.

But however modest their dress, Dutch regents and merchants were not immune to the temptation to display their wealth. The riches that came in with the tides and flowed into the coffers of these immensely wealthy merchants and their backers had to find outlets of some sort. Some of the money, spent on food and wine or used to import produce to the towns from the countryside, trickled down to the lower levels of society and helped to raise standards of living throughout the republic. Much was saved, or reinvested. Still, there is no question that the profits of the rich trades also fueled consumption of all manner of luxuries, from great houses to paintings to tulips, making possible the remarkable variety and richness of the Golden Age that the United Provinces enjoyed between 1600 and 1670.

It was a time of tremendous cultural progress. The arts flourished as never before, fueled not only by the establishment of Leiden and other universities and schools but also by the arrival of many painters and writers from the south. So many artists, indeed, were looking for work that it became possible to commission a new painting or a play for a fraction of the usual cost. Many towns and private citizens took advantage of this fact, and visitors to the United Provinces were always greatly impressed by the variety and magnificence of the canvases, the tapestries, and the statuary that turned up in the most surprising places. At the same time several of the most brilliant artists were developing new techniques of realistic portraiture, creating the styles that men of the stature of Rembrandt (a Leiden miller"s son) and Frans Hals (a refugee from Antwerp) perfected. Architecture, too, enjoyed a renaissance as the new republic commissioned many imposing public buildings, and there were more books, more pamphlets, and more schools.

Individual Dutchmen, too, acquired a taste for building work. One of the princ.i.p.al reasons for the ever-increasing popularity of the tulip was the newfound pa.s.sion among Dutch merchants and gentry for building grand country houses where they could enjoy-and indeed show off-their burgeoning wealth. Substantial mansions sprang up in cl.u.s.ters outside the richest Dutch towns: at Leiderdorp, a village on the outskirts of Leiden, among the rolling sand dunes on the coast west of Haarlem, and on the river Vecht, where it flowed from Utrecht to Amsterdam. They were typically built in the Cla.s.sical style, fully staffed, amply proportioned, and set in extensive grounds that generally included formal gardens as well as parkland. For busy and successful merchants and for the hardworking members of the regent cla.s.s, they acted as retreats from the hasty world of the city.

Social historians have found in this pa.s.sion for house building an indicator of changing moods among the ruling cla.s.ses of the United Provinces. During their Golden Age the once sober, G.o.d-fearing Dutch-so Calvinist that their society frowned on ostentation in all its forms and ministers were fined for venturing the merest semblance of a joke in church-slowly acquired something of a taste for display. From this point of view, perhaps the most interesting product of the building craze was Zorghvliet ("Fly from Care"), the country home of a prominent regent named Jacob Cats. Cats was one of the most famous Dutchmen of his day-a mild-mannered and extremely religious man who pursued dual careers as a politician and a popular writer and became without question the most widely respected Dutchman of the age. His fortune rested on his immense success as the author of popular moralistic verse, which sold in staggering quant.i.ties throughout the republic. A typical Cats stanza, in which the poet rather savored the opportunity to warn a beautiful young girl not to trade on her good looks, went like this: Blond turns to gray Light-hearted becomes grave Red lips will turn blue Beauteous cheeks will be dull Agile legs become stiff And nimble feet halt Plump bodies lean Fine skin wrinkled Father Cats, as he was universally known, turned out more than a dozen books filled with this sort of verse, and something like fifty thousand copies of his complete poems found their way into Dutch homes; often a volume of Cats would be the only book in the house apart from a Bible. Many Dutch families regarded him fondly as an honest source of wisdom and saw his verses as a reliable guide to the moral problems of the day. If Jacob the poet thought there was nothing wrong with owning a country retreat, it was difficult to argue that there was.

This fashion for sumptuous country houses led naturally to the planting of many extensive country gardens. Dutch interest in horticulture had begun to flourish in the previous century and still showed no signs of abating. The grounds of Lord Offerbeake"s residence in Allofein, near Leiden (which an English member of Parliament, Sir William Brereton, visited in 1634), contained "s.p.a.cious gardens and mighty great orchards, and a store of fish-ponds," as well as twelve different varieties of hedgerow, a maze, long wooded walks, and of course a good number of flower beds. To be sure, Offerbeake"s was one of the grander plots in the United Provinces, but other wealthy men followed his example as best they could. Such gardens were regarded less as places of relaxation than as means of displaying the proprietor"s collection of plants.

The tacit approval of moralists such as Father Cats meant that the connoisseurs" enthusiasm for the tulip, whose beauty was after all one of those minor miracles wrought by G.o.d and whose cultivation involved honest toil in the open air (an activity heartily recommended by Cats himself), escaped the censure it might otherwise have attracted from the more Calvinist elements of Dutch society, and the flower quickly became a prominent feature of many of the grandest new residences. One tulip garden that we know something about was planted at a country house called the Moufe-schans, which was celebrated in an epic poem of some sixteen thousand verses published in 1621 by a virulently anti-Spanish minister named Petrus Hondius. The Moufe-schans, which was built on the site of some German entrenchments dug during the Dutch Revolt and whose decidedly unbucolic name actually means "Trenches of the Krauts," was owned by Johan Serlippens, the burgomaster of Neuzen. Serlippens invited his friend Hondius to stay with him, and in time the clergyman planted an herbal garden in the grounds that included six full beds of tulips, an impressive quant.i.ty for the time. Hondius probably had received some of his bulbs from Clusius and others from an apothecary friend, Christiaan Porret of Leiden.

Hondius was no tulip maniac. He grew all manner of plants in Serlippens"s garden, from carnations to hyacinths and narcissi, and he looked down on those who favored the tulip over other flowers, writing scathingly in his verse of those who had allowed themselves to get too caught up in the burgeoning craze: All these fools want is tulip bulbs Heads and hearts have but one wish Let"s try and eat them; it will make us laugh To taste how bitter is that dish But the poet was himself far from immune to the new flower"s allure. In Of de Moufe-schans Of de Moufe-schans he challenged contemporary painters to capture the tulip"s beauty on canvas-only to admit, a line or two later, that the task was quite impossible. In his garden alone, Hondius wrote, the tulips on display exhibited a greater profusion of colors than artists even knew existed. The success of his epic poem-a treasure house for social historians that contains copious information concerning not only gardening but also the lives and habits of the country people of the time-brought some of the most eminent men of the day to Serlippens"s house. The visitors we know about included Maurice of Na.s.sau, the new prince of Orange, commander in chief of the Dutch armies fighting the Spaniards, and one of the most celebrated soldiers of the day. Maurice must have liked what he saw of Hondius"s garden, for tulips were henceforth grown in the grounds of his palace at The Hague, in such quant.i.ties that they were eventually offered for public sale. (Sir William Brereton, who visited the palace a decade or so later, was able to purchase a hundred bulbs there for the modest price of five guilders.) he challenged contemporary painters to capture the tulip"s beauty on canvas-only to admit, a line or two later, that the task was quite impossible. In his garden alone, Hondius wrote, the tulips on display exhibited a greater profusion of colors than artists even knew existed. The success of his epic poem-a treasure house for social historians that contains copious information concerning not only gardening but also the lives and habits of the country people of the time-brought some of the most eminent men of the day to Serlippens"s house. The visitors we know about included Maurice of Na.s.sau, the new prince of Orange, commander in chief of the Dutch armies fighting the Spaniards, and one of the most celebrated soldiers of the day. Maurice must have liked what he saw of Hondius"s garden, for tulips were henceforth grown in the grounds of his palace at The Hague, in such quant.i.ties that they were eventually offered for public sale. (Sir William Brereton, who visited the palace a decade or so later, was able to purchase a hundred bulbs there for the modest price of five guilders.) By 1620, then, the tulip was an established favorite with many of the Dutch elite and the private pa.s.sion of some of the most influential men in the republic. But as the example of Prince Maurice shows, it was not yet so widespread as to be a commonplace for every citizen of the United Provinces. The flower was still comparatively rare, and some of the most highly sought-after varieties were hard to obtain at any price. Only in the coming decade would this scarcity be properly addressed.

CHAPTER 8

The Tulip in the Mirror.

Other regents had their country houses. Adriaen Pauw, the immensely wealthy burgomaster of Amsterdam, owned a castle. It was only a ruin, but it stood at the center of a substantial estate called Heemstede, which Pauw acquired in 1620, and occupied the only high ground between the North Sea coast and Amsterdam. From the top of the crumbling walls, Pauw enjoyed commanding views over the heartland of the Dutch Republic. On clear days, he could see all the way to the roofscape of Amsterdam. Even when it was overcast, his country home offered an arresting view of bodies swinging in the gibbets that stood outside the walls of Haarlem, less than a mile to the north.

Heemstede became Pauw"s greatest indulgence. The burgomaster lavished money on his estate. He tore the old castle down and replaced it with a modern manor house where he entertained not only the most important men of the republic but, on separate occasions, the queen of England and the queen of France. The interiors were suitably splendid; Pauw packed his new home with expensive furniture, finely woven tapestries, and the best paintings. There was a trophy room full of burnished armor and a library of sixteen thousand books, a truly gigantic quant.i.ty for the time.

While the manor house was being built, Pauw set about improving the grounds. Always an enthusiastic investor in land reclamation projects, he had tons of poor topsoil sc.r.a.ped away to reveal more fertile earth beneath. He actively encouraged farming and even light industry in the remoter portions of the estate, enlarging the population of Heemstede to more than one thousand people over time.

But Adriaen Pauw"s greatest joy was not his manor house but his garden. It was carefully laid out, after the formal fashion of the time, just in front of the house, with long tree-shaded walks bisecting ornamental lawns and flower beds filled with roses, lilies, and carnations, whose color splashes set off the geometric precision of Pauw"s box hedges and paths to perfection. And in a prominent position in the center of the garden, the new lord of Heemstede planted a single bed of tulips.

There was one very peculiar thing about Pauw"s garden, though. It wasn"t something that visitors noticed right away; in fact, although the burgomaster entertained lavishly and even permitted sightseers to wander around the estate on weekdays when he was occupied in Amsterdam, some left without even realizing it was there. But that was not altogether surprising. It was not something Pauw wanted his visitors to see.

The secret of the gardens of Heemstede was a weird contrivance of wood and cunningly angled mirrors that stood in the middle of the tulip bed. It was a looking-gla.s.s cabinet, designed to multiply whatever stood before it. Its purpose was to create an illusion of plenty where really there was none.

From a distance, and with this strange invention"s help, Pauw"s single tulip bed looked densely planted with hundreds of brilliant flowers. It was only when a curious or appreciative visitor approached more closely that he would realize it was just an optical illusion. The mirrors of the wooden cabinet had turned the few dozen tulips in Pauw"s collection into a spectacular profusion.

For the lord of Heemstede, the looking-gla.s.s cabinet was an unfortunate necessity. Pauw needed it because there were some things even he could not buy. Rich and influential though he was, the burgomaster of Amsterdam could not obtain enough tulips to fill his garden, and all the efforts of the best gardeners in Holland could not persuade the bulbs that he already had to multiply as quickly as he wanted.

Pauw"s problem was a simple one. The superbly fine varieties that he collected were extremely rare, because they were the products of a long process of selective breeding. Ever since the earliest Dutch tulips had flowered in Walich Ziwertsz."s Amsterdam garden, connoisseurs had been carefully selecting the most exquisite specimens, cultivating them with special care, and crossing them with other fine bulbs to create ever more beautiful varieties. Thus while the earliest, rudest tulips had had decades to multiply, the most valuable flowers, those that bore the most delicate colors, were only recent creations. The finest tulips of all were available in such small quant.i.ties that not even Adriaen Pauw could obtain them.

Of all the varieties acclaimed "superbly fine," easily the most coveted was a flower called Semper Augustus, the most celebrated, the scarcest, and by common consent the most wonderful tulip grown anywhere in the United Provinces during the seventeenth century-and thus also by far the most expensive. Semper Augustus was a Rosen tulip, but to call it simply a red and white flower would be like describing rubies and emeralds as red and green stones. Everyone who saw it concurred that it was a plant of quite exceptional beauty. It had a slender stem that carried its flower well clear of its leaves and showed off its vivid colors to the best effect. Beginning as a solid blue where the stem met the flower"s base, the corolla quickly turned pure white. Slim, blood-colored flares shot up the center of all six petals, and flakes and flashes of the same rich shade adorned the flower"s edges. Those fortunate enough to actually see a specimen of Semper Augustus in flower thought it a living wonder, as seductive as Aphrodite.

In truth, though, very few people ever had this privilege. Although the tulip was endlessly hymned by the connoisseurs, ill.u.s.trated in more tulip books than any other variety, and mentioned so frequently in connection with the bulb craze that it has become virtually synonymous with it, Semper Augustus was practically never actually traded. It was so rare that there were simply no bulbs to be had.

The earliest mentions of the flower date only to the 1620s. By 1624-according to the Dutch chronicler Nicolaes van Wa.s.senaer, who is virtually the only reliable source on the subject-no more than a dozen examples were then in existence, and all twelve were in the hands of a single man who was generally rumored to live in Amsterdam. The ident.i.ty of this unknown connoisseur is one of the great mysteries of the tulip craze. Van Wa.s.senaer is careful not to name him, and in the absence of any other evidence, it seems unlikely that the puzzle will ever be solved. This, perhaps, is what the reclusive connoisseur would have wished, because the chronicler makes it clear that he was determined not to part with his flowers at any price.

He could have sold his bulbs, easily. At a time when tulips were increasingly widely cultivated, the fact that no more than a dozen specimens of a superbly fine variety were in existence made them a fantastic rarity, and the evidence suggests that the owner could have charged almost any price he cared to ask for a single bulb of Semper Augustus. Instead, he turned down every request to sell his flowers.

Throughout the 1620s the wealthy connoisseurs of the republic bombarded the man with ever more extravagant offers for a single bulb. The sums they were willing to pay were not just large, they were spectacular; van Wa.s.senaer records that in 1623 twelve thousand guilders was not enough to procure ten bulbs. The reclusive connoisseur who grew the flower, he states, valued the private satisfaction of gazing on the beauty of Semper Augustus over any potential profit. Yet his refusal to consider offers merely drove his desperate colleagues to raise their bids. Next summer offers as high as two or three thousand guilders a bulb were made-and just as summarily rejected.

It is with the mysterious Semper Augustus, then, that the first symptoms of what would become known as tulip mania appear. Quite how the flower first made its way to the United Provinces is not known. According to van Wa.s.senaer, the tulip was grown originally from seed owned by a florist in northern France, but not recognizing its value, he disposed of it for a pittance. This must have been around the year 1614. Ten or twelve years later, when the species had eclipsed all other flowers, connoisseurs from Holland hurried south to scour the nurseries and gardens of Flanders, Brabant, and northern France for other specimens of the Semper Augustus. It was a fantastically difficult task, and they met with no success. A few similarly patterned flowers were located-one even received the name Parem Augusto, in honor of its apparent kinship-but somehow none quite matched the empress of tulips in the vividness of its color or the purity of its form.

This failure forced Dutch connoisseurs to try a new tack, and for a while they attempted to promote the most gorgeous specimens from their own collections as rivals to Semper Augustus. Van Wa.s.senaer mentions the varieties Testament Clusii, Testament Coornhert, Motarum van Chasteleyn, and Jufferkens van Marten de Fort in this connection, but striking though these flowers were, none of them excited anything like the admiration reserved for the red-flamed empress. Nor did persistent rumors that a tulip eclipsing even Semper Augustus in beauty had been found growing in a garden in Cologne ever amount to anything.

In the end, though, all the mysterious owner"s efforts to control the supply of Semper Augustus proved to be in vain. Van Wa.s.senaer explains that early on the connoisseur who had discovered the variety did agree to sell a single precious bulb, for the not-inconsiderable sum of a thousand guilders. When the flower was lifted from its bed, he saw that it had grown two offsets from its base. This discovery mortified the connoisseur, who might reasonably have demanded three thousand guilders, rather than one thousand, for the tulip, but it was a piece of tremendous good fortune for the buyer, who had every incentive to sell one of the offsets to recoup his investment in the flower. He now held the makings of a valuable collection in his hand.

From this uncertain start Semper Augustus did very gradually become available to those who could afford to pay for it. Bulbs of this most highly sought-after of flowers appear to have produced viable offsets only rarely-this was a characteristic of the most superbly fine tulips, perhaps because they were more heavily infected with the mosaic virus than were ruder varieties-and even a decade later only a handful existed. Of course, the continued rarity of Semper Augustus did not stop connoisseurs from coveting the flower; in fact, it merely fanned their ardor. That was as good a measure as any of the frenzy for rare bulbs that was now beginning to well up inside the Dutch Republic.

The scarcity of tulips in seventeenth-century Holland is central to a proper understanding of the bulb craze. To a Dutchman of the Golden Age, the tulip was not a mundane and readily available flower. It was a brilliant newcomer, still bearing something of the allure of the exotic East and obtainable only in strictly limited quant.i.ties. Because the most superbly fine varieties were scarce, they were coveted; because they were coveted, they were expensive. And because they were expensive, they became increasingly lucrative to grow.

A handful of tulip connoisseurs had always produced their own flowers and been keen and able horticulturalists in their own right. For example, the brothers Balthasar and Daniel de Neufville-a pair of rich linen merchants from Haarlem-bred two new varieties, one a Rosen and the other a Violetten, which they grew in the garden of a house just inside the city walls that they had named "the Land of Promise." Most of their contemporaries, however, were less skilled, and by the late 1620s it was increasingly apparent that demand for tulips could no longer be met simply by the exchange of small quant.i.ties of bulbs among connoisseurs. New enthusiasts for the flower, who had none of the skills needed to breed varieties of their own and few of the connections necessary to obtain bulbs in the traditional way, had begun to enter the market. Some possessed extensive gardens and wished to cultivate tulips of many different varieties. These newcomers were forced to look elsewhere for their supplies.

They turned to the handful of professional horticulturalists who had begun to cultivate the fashionable new flowers. This was a key development in the history of the tulip, for there can be no doubt that without the efforts of the professionals many fewer new varieties would have been developed. The total quant.i.ty of bulbs in circulation would have been less too, and the speed with which the tulip spread across the United Provinces would have been reduced.

By 1630 professional flower growers could be found in almost every town in the Dutch Republic. Most cultivated all manner of flowers, although a number, such as Henrik Pottebacker of Gouda-creator of the Rosen variety Pottebacker Gevlamt and the rust-and-yellow-flamed Bizarden Admirael Pottebacker-had begun to specialize in tulips. They were expert horticulturalists and-just as importantly-they had a keen eye for what was valuable and what would sell.

At the top of the market Semper Augustus"s closest rivals included Viceroy-a big, bold, purple-flamed flower generally recognized as the king of the Violetten-and at the head of the Bizarden, a flower called Root en Gheel van Leyde ("Red and yellow of Leiden"). At the bottom, the cheapest and least coveted flowers were simple unicolored flowers, their petals colored yellow, red, or white, which-being the earliest of all Dutch tulips-were also the most common.

Gardeners such as Pottebacker had not sprung from nowhere. They had learned their skills from earlier, less polished growers who had existed in small numbers since the end of the sixteenth century and scratched a living in the limited markets of the day. Clusius and his circle of aristocratic friends possessed a low opinion of these first professionals, criticizing them for their often alarming ignorance of botany and despising their willingness to bestow crudely populist names on the new varieties that occasionally appeared-more, perhaps, by luck than judgment-in their gardens. Nevertheless, they grew tulips, and they were learning.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the handful of pioneer bulb farmers (who then based themselves in the countryside just outside Brussels) were having to compete with an even more discreditable group of itinerant flower collectors. These restless individualists scoured the countryside-mostly in France-for unusual specimens and sold them to collectors, mostly in the Netherlands. They called themselves rhizotomi rhizotomi (the word is Greek for "root cutters"), and even Clusius, in his declining years, found them useful sources of flowers that he was no longer mobile enough to collect for himself. (the word is Greek for "root cutters"), and even Clusius, in his declining years, found them useful sources of flowers that he was no longer mobile enough to collect for himself.

At least a few of the rhizotomi rhizotomi were honorable men-Clusius names Nicolas le Quilt of Paris and Guilielmus Boelius as reliable suppliers of the rare bulbs he still sought-but on the whole the collectors had a slightly unsavory reputation. This was because it was easy for them to palm off ordinary seeds and bulbs as rarities and to claim substantial payments for their labors, safe in the knowledge that they would be long gone and back over the border in France before the flowers bloomed and the fraud was discovered. Since it was quite impossible for even an expert botanist such as Clusius to tell what sort of tulip would grow from an anonymous brown bulb, this problem was destined to cause all sorts of disputes before the bulb craze reached its height. were honorable men-Clusius names Nicolas le Quilt of Paris and Guilielmus Boelius as reliable suppliers of the rare bulbs he still sought-but on the whole the collectors had a slightly unsavory reputation. This was because it was easy for them to palm off ordinary seeds and bulbs as rarities and to claim substantial payments for their labors, safe in the knowledge that they would be long gone and back over the border in France before the flowers bloomed and the fraud was discovered. Since it was quite impossible for even an expert botanist such as Clusius to tell what sort of tulip would grow from an anonymous brown bulb, this problem was destined to cause all sorts of disputes before the bulb craze reached its height.

Nor were the rhizotomi rhizotomi the only people searching the countryside for rare plants in the first years of the new century; wild tulips were increasingly available from apothecaries too, collected during trips to gather medicinal plants and herbs. Among those known to have stocked the bulbs are three Dutchmen: Willem van de Kemp of Utrecht, Petrus Garret of Amsterdam, and Christiaan Porret of Leiden. the only people searching the countryside for rare plants in the first years of the new century; wild tulips were increasingly available from apothecaries too, collected during trips to gather medicinal plants and herbs. Among those known to have stocked the bulbs are three Dutchmen: Willem van de Kemp of Utrecht, Petrus Garret of Amsterdam, and Christiaan Porret of Leiden.

Apothecaries-early pharmacists who peddled folk and quack remedies to those who could not afford the services of the few qualified physicians of the time-were as commonplace in the seventeenth century as pharmacists are today. They wore the same uniform as doctors-black robes and coat, collar bands, and a pointed hat-but their premises were easily identified by their traditional symbol, a stuffed crocodile, which generally hung suspended from the ceiling over the counter.

Principled though some undoubtedly were, apothecaries shared with the rhizotomi rhizotomi a certain notoriety as disreputable opportunists in the first years of the seventeenth century. They had only recently left the grocers" guild, to which they had belonged for centuries, to join the physicians-so recently, indeed, that their shops were still the only places where Dutchmen were allowed to buy fruit tarts. But many apothecaries had come up with better ways of making money than that. Their premises often doubled as clandestine drinking dens, and many secretly offered medical consultations, which were really supposed to be the monopoly of physicians. Such men were happy to meet the growing demand for tulips by supplying dried bulbs. Some of their customers were genuine flower lovers and connoisseurs, but it appears that the more unscrupulous apothecaries also promoted bulbs as an aphrodisiac. a certain notoriety as disreputable opportunists in the first years of the seventeenth century. They had only recently left the grocers" guild, to which they had belonged for centuries, to join the physicians-so recently, indeed, that their shops were still the only places where Dutchmen were allowed to buy fruit tarts. But many apothecaries had come up with better ways of making money than that. Their premises often doubled as clandestine drinking dens, and many secretly offered medical consultations, which were really supposed to be the monopoly of physicians. Such men were happy to meet the growing demand for tulips by supplying dried bulbs. Some of their customers were genuine flower lovers and connoisseurs, but it appears that the more unscrupulous apothecaries also promoted bulbs as an aphrodisiac.

It was only gradually, between the years 1600 and 1630, that the buccaneering rhizotomi rhizotomi and the apothecaries were supplanted by the new breed of respectable professional nurserymen. Many of these growers were based in Haarlem, the second largest city in the province of Holland, which had been built on the sort of poor, sandy soil that was ideally suited to the cultivation of tulips. They favored small plots of rented land just outside the city walls and within easy walking distance of the gates. According to Haarlem tradition, most of the city"s tulip gardens were just outside the Grote Houtpoort-the Great Wood-Gate-that guarded one of the two southern entries to the town. But perhaps the best of Haarlem"s little flower farms were situated along the bosky Kleine Houtweg, the Little Wood-Road, which ran from the other gate on the south side of the city down through an area still known today as the rose district and on to the famous Haarlem Wood, which was the city"s favorite beauty spot. More than twenty nurserymen were based along this road, and it was here that the famous tulip grower David de Mildt, who figures prominently in many of the surviving records of the mania, had his garden at a spot named Twijnderslaan. When de Mildt died, aged only thirty-three, at the height of the craze, his plot was taken over by another prominent tulip grower, Barent Cardoes, and renamed the Garden of Flora. Under Cardoes"s management, it became one of the best-regarded bulb farms in Holland. and the apothecaries were supplanted by the new breed of respectable professional nurserymen. Many of these growers were based in Haarlem, the second largest city in the province of Holland, which had been built on the sort of poor, sandy soil that was ideally suited to the cultivation of tulips. They favored small plots of rented land just outside the city walls and within easy walking distance of the gates. According to Haarlem tradition, most of the city"s tulip gardens were just outside the Grote Houtpoort-the Great Wood-Gate-that guarded one of the two southern entries to the town. But perhaps the best of Haarlem"s little flower farms were situated along the bosky Kleine Houtweg, the Little Wood-Road, which ran from the other gate on the south side of the city down through an area still known today as the rose district and on to the famous Haarlem Wood, which was the city"s favorite beauty spot. More than twenty nurserymen were based along this road, and it was here that the famous tulip grower David de Mildt, who figures prominently in many of the surviving records of the mania, had his garden at a spot named Twijnderslaan. When de Mildt died, aged only thirty-three, at the height of the craze, his plot was taken over by another prominent tulip grower, Barent Cardoes, and renamed the Garden of Flora. Under Cardoes"s management, it became one of the best-regarded bulb farms in Holland.

Barent Cardoes learned his trade working for another Haarlem grower, the celebrated Pieter Bol. Bol was the creator of Violetten Anvers Bol and several other superbly fine varieties and possibly the richest tulip grower of the age. Unlike the majority of his fellow growers, he was, it would appear, a patrician and a connoisseur who employed professional gardeners such as Cardoes to do much of the actual work involved in cultivating his bulbs. But some way south of the city, in the lordship of Vianen, lived another grower who came from a much humbler background. His name was Francisco Gomes da Costa, and he was probably the most industrious of all the horticulturists in the United Provinces.

Da Costa was a Portuguese grower who made a name for himself by the sheer variety of tulips he created. He seems never to have mastered the Dutch tongue with much confidence-the ma.n.u.script of a gardening book he commissioned for his own use still survives, which lists the names of all his flowers phonetically for his benefit-but he was an unparalleled innovator in the garden. No fewer than eight varieties bore his name. One of his most famous creations was Paragon da Costa-a Paragon being generally defined as a variety that was an improvement on an existing flower, usually because its colors were finer or more intense. On that basis, Francisco da Costa"s proudest achievement was probably Paragon Viceroy da Costa, a tulip that claimed to improve on the unimprovable Viceroy.

For an immigrant such as da Costa, tulip farming was attractive for precisely the same reasons that it appealed to many of the Dutch. Little investment was required, a small plot of land and some tulip seed or bulbs being all that was required to start; tulips were hardy and grew well in poor soil; and bulb growers were not required to belong to any of the restrictive and expensive guilds that so rigorously controlled most of the trades and professions in the Dutch Republic.

To anyone who was at all horticulturally inclined, however, it was the profits that could be made in the tulip trade that proved most alluring. Individual growers certainly became wealthy. Pieter Bol"s name is mentioned as one of those who profited most from the flower business, but when the Haarlem dealer Jan van Damme died in 1643, he left an estate consisting primarily of tulip bulbs that was valued at 42,000 guilders, a fortune that ranked him alongside many of the wealthy merchants who had made their money in the rich trades.

Where did all this money come from? Successful growers such as van Damme owed their success to an ability to exploit every possible market for their bulbs. Most found ready customers among the connoisseurs and the owners of fashionable new country houses, but they were also happy to sell their bulbs to members of the emerging merchant cla.s.s as well. And from as early as 1610 a few intelligent horticulturalists were selling their tulips in the Holy Roman Empire and, no doubt, the southern Netherlands and northern France. What started as a very minor export trade indeed grew, slowly but surely, to the point where in the first quarter of the eighteenth century the Dutch were shipping cargoes of bulbs to North America, the Mediterranean, and even the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps the first Dutch bulb dealer to move into the export trade was Emanuel Sweerts, another old friend of Clusius"s who kept a curiosity shop in Amsterdam and was active in the first decade of the century. He not only imported bulbs from all over Europe but began to offer tulips for sale at the Messe Messe, a vast fair held each year at Frankfurt am Main. (The Frankfurt Book Fair, which still attracts tens of thousands of publishers to the city each year, is actually a survivor of this tremendous medieval market.) The increasing professionalism of the bulb trade posed one important problem for men such as Emanuel Sweerts. Tulips were in flower for only a few days each year; they had to be sold as bulbs. But these plain brown packages offered no clue to the glories they concealed within, and they certainly did not look like an enticing investment. Sweerts came up with the solution: a catalog packed with ill.u.s.trations portraying his tulips in all their glory. He persuaded the most eminent of all his clients, the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II, to pay the print bill-the same emperor who had once dismissed Clusius from the imperial service but who now dabbled in tulips in between conducting the alchemical experiments that were his chief pa.s.sion-and published his catalog, the Florilegium Florilegium, in Frankfurt just before his death in 1612. The Florilegium Florilegium was modeled on contemporary herbals; there was very little text, but each of the tulips within it was accorded a concise description, in Latin, which gave the essential information about its shape and color. was modeled on contemporary herbals; there was very little text, but each of the tulips within it was accorded a concise description, in Latin, which gave the essential information about its shape and color.

Only two years after the Florilegium Florilegium first appeared, a Dutch artist named Chrispijn van de Pa.s.se produced a similar book called the first appeared, a Dutch artist named Chrispijn van de Pa.s.se produced a similar book called the Hortus Floridus Hortus Floridus. Van de Pa.s.se, the son of a Flemish engraver, was only seventeen years old when his book appeared, but it proved to be one of the most successful botanical works of the age and was quickly translated from the original Latin into French, English, and Dutch. The Dutch edition featured a list of the leading tulip enthusiasts of the early seventeenth century, and later impressions included an appendix devoted entirely to the flower, showing that a lively trade in bulbs already existed between the United Provinces and Germany.

It was not long before the Hortus Floridus Hortus Floridus began to serve as a handy catalog for nurserymen who did not enjoy the luxury of a wealthy patron willing to bankroll the production of a book such as the began to serve as a handy catalog for nurserymen who did not enjoy the luxury of a wealthy patron willing to bankroll the production of a book such as the Florilegium Florilegium. But there was a limit to the usefulness of a general printed catalog, particularly in the early days of the tulip trade, when every grower offered his own unique varieties for sale. This problem was solved by the introduction of one of the most notable traditions of the bulb craze-the production of richly ill.u.s.trated, privately commissioned ma.n.u.scripts called tulip books. A significant number of these alb.u.ms were produced for individual Dutch horticulturalists and nearly fifty are known today; they were anything up to five hundred pages long and typically contained one ill.u.s.tration per page, executed in watercolor or gouache. Each picture was generally accompanied by the tulip"s name but only very occasionally by any information regarding price. There is a suspicion that bulb growers, like many modern-day antique dealers, preferred to price their bulbs according to their a.s.sessment of their customers" wealth.

Customers who paid more than they antic.i.p.ated for their bulbs were not the only people to be shortchanged by the owners of the tulip books; the artists who ill.u.s.trated them-a few of whom were eminent painters in their own right-were generally very poorly paid for their efforts, perhaps earning only a handful of stuivers per page. Marginal notes in a book painted largely by Jacob van Swanenburch of Leiden, the master who taught Rembrandt van Rijn, show that the painter completed 122 flower pictures for a fee of just over six stuivers per painting.

Jacob van Swanenburch was not the only highly regarded artist to contribute to a grower"s tulip book. Judith Leyster, the only woman who actually earned her living as a painter in the United Provinces during the Golden Age, painted two Rosen tulips for an alb.u.m now commonly known as Judith Leyster"s Tulip Book Judith Leyster"s Tulip Book in her honor, although the rest of the paintings are by other hands, and Pieter Holsteijn the Younger ill.u.s.trated a ma.n.u.script for a grower named Cos that carries the date 1637 and, unusually, gives not only the flowers" names (some of them in the form of a riddle or a rebus) but their price and the weight of each bulb when planted. It consisted of fifty-three gouaches of tulips, with twelve additional drawings and some watercolors of carnations. in her honor, although the rest of the paintings are by other hands, and Pieter Holsteijn the Younger ill.u.s.trated a ma.n.u.script for a grower named Cos that carries the date 1637 and, unusually, gives not only the flowers" names (some of them in the form of a riddle or a rebus) but their price and the weight of each bulb when planted. It consisted of fifty-three gouaches of tulips, with twelve additional drawings and some watercolors of carnations.

A close study of this and other flower alb.u.ms shows that many of the artists who produced them created something approaching a production line of ill.u.s.trations by arranging for their a.s.sistants to paint the flowers" leaves and stems (often in a hackneyed style that probably bore only a sketchy resemblance to their real appearance) and executing only the difficult portion-the petals-themselves. Others copied sketches of the rarest varieties from earlier books, although some of the tulips were so scarce that they must have been included more for the sake of completeness than anything else.

With tulip books at their disposal, Dutch nurserymen were armed with a valuable sales tool that could be used to attract more customers and lure existing ones to try new varieties. But the surviving alb.u.ms, thronged with page after page of all but identical Rosen, Violetten, and Bizarden flowers, inadvertently make an important point about the often-chaotic workings of the seventeenth-century flower trade.

One of the major difficulties facing both growers and connoisseurs was the problem of distinguishing between strikingly similar varieties. Even the most knowledgeable dealers and growers must have found it difficult, if not impossible, to tell one Rosen tulip from another with almost identical markings, even though those varieties might be worth very different sums. This problem lay at the root of a number of the sometimes bitter disputes between growers and their customers that dot the surviving records of the flower trade.

The fact that tulips of the same variety differed one from another and from generation to generation did not help; nor did the plethora of confusingly similar names that were bestowed upon new flowers by their creators. Outsiders found the chaotic nomenclature of Dutch tulips almost impossible to grapple with. In this early period there were no firm rules and certainly no central authority that could impose any sort of order on the way tulips were named. Anyone who created a new variety had the privilege of conferring a t.i.tle upon it, and generally they chose either to give it an overblown name that hinted at the exceptional qualities they felt it possessed, or to name it after themselves. Quite frequently they managed to do both.

The man who inadvertently found himself responsible for this craze was the bailiff of Kennermerland, the coastal region between Haarlem and the sea. He created a Rosen tulip of exceptional beauty, and casting around for a name to convey its excellence, he decided to christen it Admirael ("admiral"). Before long the Admirael name had become the highest epithet to which a tulip could aspire, and other growers flocked to apply it to their own creations: Admirael Liefkens, Admirael Krijntje, Admirael van Enckhuysen, and the most celebrated of all, Admirael van der Eijck. Foreigners sometimes made the mistake of believing that these flowers were named after naval heroes of the Dutch Revolt, but of course they really commemorated not sailors but the horticulturists who had created the flower. At the time of the tulip mania there were already about fifty different varieties with the Admirael prefix, and another thirty or so that bore the rival t.i.tle Generael ("general"). The Generaels included one flower that had been named Generael van der Eijck, perhaps in the hope of persuading potential buyers that its qualities matched those of the fabled Admirael tulip.

Nor did matters end there. Once the fashion for Admiraels and Generaels had run its course, growers took the logical next step of searching for new superlatives and created a cla.s.s of plants named Generalissimo. Next came varieties named after real Cla.s.sical heroes such as Alexander the Great and Scipio, and eventually two tulips from Gouda t.i.tled, with breathtaking arrogance, "Admiral of Admirals" and "General of Generals." At least these really were superbly fine varieties, noted for their size and fiery scarlet stripes.

Such practices meant that many inferior tulips received the Admirael or Generael name, and customers could not necessarily even determine the sort of flower they were buying simply from its t.i.tle. Generaels, for example, were almost always Rosen tulips, but at least three Violettens bore the name, and there were Violetten and even Bizarden Admiraels. Naturally all this confusion meant that growers had to do what they could to publicize the new varieties they had created. One contemporary writer explained how this was done: If a change in a Tulip is effected, one goes to a florist and tells him, and it soon gets talked about. Everyone is anxious to see it. If it is a new flower, each one gives his opinion; one compares it to this, another to that, flower. If it looks like an Admirael you call it a Generael, or any other name you fancy, and stand a bottle of wine to your friends that they may remember to talk about it.

Talk they did. By 1633 the combined efforts of the growers and the connoisseurs, the rhizotomi rhizotomi and the apothecaries, had all but solved the old problem of scarcity. Tulips were at last widely available throughout the Netherlands. A total of some five hundred different varieties were by then being grown in the Dutch Republic alone-some superbly fine and extremely rare, but others, still beautiful, rather easier to obtain. And as the supply of bulbs steadily increased, the flower began to attract new admirers among the tradesmen and working men of the Dutch Republic-men who had not until then been able to afford tulips or displayed much interest in the bulb trade. and the apothecaries, had all but solved the old problem of scarcity. Tulips were at last widely available throughout the Netherlands. A total of some five hundred different

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