The Tulip

by Anna Pavord

  Sweert’s and de Passe’s catalogues helped to broaden the potential market for tulips and, slowly, the fancy moved out from court circles to embrace a wider circle of aficionados, especially in the Dutch and German towns of the lower Rhine. By the 1620s the tulip was the sine qua non of fashionable gardens in the Netherlands, the western parts of Germany and Flanders, where a great deal of breeding was already going on. The work of the Flemish artist, Jan Brueghel, shows how much the tulips had developed since the first striped kinds had been noted by Clusius. Paintings such as the fabulous Vase of Flowers at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, show tulips intricately feathered in contrasting colours, red on white, red on yellow, yellow on red (though there are none of the dark purple and white types that were later to become fashionable; that ‘break’ does not yet seem to have occurred). Brueghel’s Allegory of Spring,20 painted in 1616, shows similar tulips growing in a garden border. There is just one of each kind, including a showy bi-colour splayed open to show the regular markings of red round the edges of the white petals. Fleurs-de-lys, tree peonies, anemones, a grand Fritillaria imperialis and aquilegias are the tulips’ companions.

  By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the tulip was well established in France, reaching the Provençal garden of M Peiresc by 1611. The country subsequently entered into a period of tulip madness even more extravagant than the better-known tulipomania which later engulfed Holland. A thriving brewery, worth 30,000 francs, was handed over to one grower as the price for a single bulb of the modish variety ‘Tulipe Brasserie’. In 1608, a miller exchanged his mill for a bulb of ‘Mère Brune’. Later, a groom was over-joyed when his father-in-law gave him, as a dowry for his daughter, the entire stock (one bulb) of a fine double red and white striped tulip that he had bred and christened, appropriately, ‘Mariage de ma Fille’. No woman of fashion stepped on to the street without a posy of rare tulips, the flowers worn like jewels in her décolletage. They were scarcely less expensive. Cashing in on the craze, Pierre Vallet (1575–1635), described as ‘embroiderer’ to Henry IV of France, published a book of engravings of flowers, including tulips, taken from specimens growing in the extensive collection at Pierre Robin’s nursery garden in Paris. In well-to-do households, flowers began to be used inside houses, as well as in gardens. They filled empty fireplaces, they were strewn over the tablecloths brought out for important banquets. At a French wedding of 1680, the table was decorated with nineteen baskets of flowers, with anemones, hyacinths, jasmine and orange blossom as well as tulips.21 A beautiful florilegium made in 1610 by Jean Le Roy de la Boissière of Poitiers22 shows many of the garden flowers popular at the time and includes more than forty tulips. The gorgeous paintings made by Nicolas Robert (1614–1685) for Louis XIV’s brother, Gaston d’Orléans, also show the flowers that French tulip fanciers prized at the time. Already, tulips had attracted a particular French vocabulary, which was adopted wholesale by both Dutch and English growers. The French terms remained common currency in England at least until the middle of the eighteenth century when the fashion for all things French waned in the wake of England’s war with France.

  Born in Langres, the son of an innkeeper, Robert had made his name with a small book of flower etchings, Diversi Fiori, published in Rome in 1640, but his major work was done for his influential patron, Gaston d’Orléans. Using watercolour on vellum, Robert painstakingly recorded the extraordinary collection of animals and plants that the Duc d’Orléans had in his garden and menagerie at Blois: a striking, parti-coloured Parrot tulip of red, green and yellow, several red tulips, including the ‘Jaspée de Haarlem’, flared and streaked with yellow, elegant pale creamy-white tulips, touched at the edges of their petals with pink, a deep pink tulip, perhaps a forerunner of the modern Lily-flowered types, pinched in very tightly at the waist and flaring out at the top, the petals tipped and streaked with green. The tulips are variously described as burinées, fouettées, pennachées, all terms that characterise the feathering and flaming or ‘breaking’ of the colour that was the distinguishing mark of the most highly sought-after tulips of the time. They are charmingly arranged on each sheet, the tulips mixed with other treasures of the Blois garden: anemones, hepaticas, hyacinths, pansies, campanulas.

  Many of these treasures had been supplied by the Paris nurseryman, Pierre Morin, who had customers all over Europe. The English diarist, John Evelyn (1620–1706), more of a tree-man than a bulb-man himself, mentions in his Memoirs Morin’s collection of rare shells and flowers, which included 10,000 tulips. Evelyn visited him in 1651, the year Pierre Morin and his brother René published their first trade catalogue and reported seeing thousands of tulips, as well as ‘books painted with all his flowers’. The Morins also sold bulbs to John Tradescant for the grand Cecil garden at Hatfield in England.

  Commanding huge prices in France, the tulip was indeed ‘l’Impératrice des Fleurs et la plus belle Production de la Nature’, as Charles de la Chesnée-Monstereul described it.23 Given the French obsession with the flower, it was not surprising that specialist monographs such as this proliferated through the century. Most of them stemmed from the Traité compendieux et abrégé des Tulippes et de leurs diverses sortes et espèces - snappy titles were a seventeenth-century speciality – published anonymously in Paris in 1617 and mercilessly plagiarised for the next hundred years. The tulip’s value gave it a special aura, surrounding it with mystique and the language of alchemy. Growers wanted it to seem strange, unattainable and difficult because that increased its worth. The tulip, said Monstereul, ranked as high among flowers as man among other animals and the diamond among precious stones. Much of its mystique, its charisma, had to do with the mysterious process of ‘breaking’, whereby a plain tulip could change into a fabulous multi-coloured one, feathered and flamed in contrasting colours. In seventeenth-century terms, this was nothing less than magic and Monstereul’s response was typical: ‘J’ai pensé que c’étoit quelque Puissance Souveraine, qui me le defendoit, ne voulant pas que les secrets de la divinité fussent connus que des sages, afin de n’être pas profanes du vulgaire…& suivant ce dessein je dirai aux curieux Floristes:

  ‘Si tu multiplie la vertu de ta mère, la nourissant de la cendre de ses os, & de la substance de son père, alors tu possédera la terre de promission, en laquelle sera un étang de lait, au vers duquel passera des fleuves de vin & autres liqueurs de diverses couleurs, plusieurs rochers d’or seront espars en lui, son fond sera rempli de ces huitres, qui vomissant leur rouge cramoisy sur le sable, produiront le beau pourpre, & si tu veux suivre la mode le lait de l’étang se changera en liqueur de safran qui te donnera du souci.’

  The riddle was not difficult to decipher, but the smoke-screens that seventeenth-century writers puffed around the tulip compared badly with the clarity, the thirst to explain and teach, that had characterised the work of the earliest writers on plants. But among the mumbo-jumbo there was also practical advice. Monstereul explained that white, yellow and red tulips were the most common but the least esteemed. ‘There are likewise speckled Tulips, which have more and more different Colours; yet not separated from one another, but mixed together like a Jaspar.’24 He mentions double tulips with twenty or more petals. Like Clusius earlier, he distinguishes three different sorts: early, mid-season and late-flowering. He looks at the properties of a good tulip: the need for a good shape and a good bottom. The most highly favoured tulips of the time had bases of the finest sky-blue, like the present-day Cottage tulip ‘Shirley’. Colour on the flower had to be evenly distributed and glossy, as good on the insides of the petals as out. Any stripe or flame ought to begin at the bottom of the petal and travel all the way up it. Beauty consisted not just in certain colours being there, but in their being distinct. He recommended that the petals themselves should turn on the outside like a bell. This was purely a matter of fashion. English florists equally adamantly expressed a preference for tulips shaped as half-spheres.

  The best of the striped tulips were called Crowns and they could be
either red and yellow or white and red. The Paltodys were finer and more neatly striped than the Crowns. The Agats were striped with two colours, the more desirable Agatines with three. The Marquatines or Marquetrines might have four, five and sometimes even more colours. ‘These are the most esteemed of any by the Curious, who look upon them as the End and Highest Reward of their Art and Labour,’ said Monstereul. He also mentioned ‘another Sort of Tulip of an uncommon Shape, of several Colours and frightful to look upon; for which Reason they are called “Monsters”’. Were these the first Parrot tulips?

  On the matter of tulip seed producing flowers that were different from either of their parents, Monstereul pronounced himself frankly ‘in the Dark’. He concluded that those seeds that had most air would produce blue tulips, those that had most weather would be white and those that had most sun would be red. It was a kind of doctrine of signatures. He supported the charming notion that ‘Tulips receive their colours at the Moment of their Birth from the Principles which the predominant Elements infuse into them’. Like other good gardeners since, he urged the ‘Curious’ to mark the best of their Tulips so that offsets of the most highly prized kinds would not be lost.

  As to planting, Monstereul advised it to be done in October, ‘laissant le commencement de Novembre pour les paresseux, et sa fin aux nonchalents’. The bulbs had to be stored during the summer in tulip boxes, laid out in the order in which they were to be replanted in the beds. Like other keen tulip fanciers, Monstereul noticed that the longed-for striping was often associated with a weakening of the tulip. A plain-flowered tulip that turned into a Paragon usually had a smaller flower. (‘Paragon’ was a term indiscriminately attached by growers to a striped tulip that was better than any other of its kind). The leaves were closer together, the stalk thinner. But he put effect before cause. He supposed that the striped flower was not strong enough to draw all its colour up to the tops of its petals. Infuriatingly too, striped flowers produced fewer offsets than plain-flowered tulips. All enthusiasts had worked out that offsets, the small bulblets produced alongside the mother bulb, differed from seed in that they always showed the same characteristics as the parent. They were the only means by which stock of a prized flower could be increased. This was a particular problem with the Marquetrines, ‘the only Tulips upon which the most curious Florists chiefly employ their time and thoughts, and spare no expense to increase the Beauty of them’.

  Among his favourite tulips were ‘Cedanulle’ (from the Latin cede nulli) ‘a fair Violet very distinct from the Purple’, ‘Dorille’ and ‘Passe Zablon’ which were both mixtures of purple, violet and white. He liked the tawny tulips, ‘Roman Agate’, ‘Galate’ and ‘Widdow’ and speckled flowers such as ‘Tuder’ and ‘Harlon’. The Marquetrines had a great deal of white in their petals. The Fantasticks had yellow petals striped with brown, sometimes threaded with purple, a combination much favoured later by the English florists who called them Bizarres. Despite the fact that they were slightly muddy in appearance, Monstereul noted that florists were particularly fond of the Fantasticks, not only because they were rare, but because they were inconstant. The inconstancy gave an extra edge to their growing, an extra prospect of producing a ‘Fantastickissimo’ to beat all other Fantasticks. ‘The inconstancy of Man always runs after Novelty,’ he wrote wearily.

  He noted that yellow tulips were most likely to ‘retain the smell of the Plant from whence they came’ and that striped tulips usually came from flowers that in bud ‘have the shape of two small horns or Cock-spurs’. In breeding, the secret lay in understanding the bottoms of the flowers. Tulips with white or blue bottoms were far more likely to produce desirable breaks than those with black or yellow bottoms, though the Fantasticks came from yellow-bottomed flowers. ‘We finish by Art things which Nature has only projected.’ On the matter of breaking, Monstereul was ‘in the Dark’ again, though he did not want to admit it. Hence the conundrum, with its enigmatic, almost masonic overtones. In his opinion ‘none but Understanding and knowing Florists, ought to be taught the Mystery of bringing Tulips to Perfection’. He had, he wrote, been forbidden to throw light on the puzzle ‘to any but the knowing, that it might not be defiled by the Profane and Vulgar’. Perhaps he took his cue from Bacon who considered that a man who ‘discovers Secrets, diminishes and lowers their Value’. ‘Those that have Eyes and Ears will understand,’ he finishes, after all his mumbo-jumbo about bones, rocks and rivers of wine. As was later to happen in England, the tulip, which had reigned as the supreme flower of fashion among the rich, was later captured by a clique of growers whose self-interest demanded that they keep amateurs at arms’ length. Monstereul held up to his readers the terrible example of a florist at Rouen who had ruined his entire stock of tulips by treating the beds with pigeon’s dung, which he supposed would make them break. ‘I will not therefore throw Pearl before Swine, since this Treasure ought to be made known only to the skilful by Communication in Writing, and not by Printed Books,’ he said severely.

  In his opinion, the difference between a true Florist and an ignorant pretender was that the pretenders, like swine, ‘love to scuffle through our Flower-Gardens, to carry off their Riches by their Greatness and Impudence… To hear them speak of Tulips is a murdering Noise.’ He credited the Flemish with introducing the taste for tulips to the French who consequently ‘devinrent les adorateurs de ces divinités terrestres’ and puts forward another contender for the honour of introducing the tulip into Europe – Lopez Sampayo. The Portuguese navigator, Édouard Barberose, author of a book about his voyage to the Indies, wrote that Sampayo, a sea captain, had brought tulips into Portugal in 1530. Sampayo presented the flowers to the King of Portugal who gave them ‘plus valoir que les excréments de la terre’. The tulips multiplied – as they would in that country of hot, bulb-baking summers – and their reputation quickly spread into the other countries of Europe.25

  According to this account, Flemish traders ‘épris de la beauté & majesté de cette belle fleur’, were responsible for bringing the tulip out of Portugal and into the Low Countries ‘en changèrent à des précieuses marchandises, & l’ayant apportée en Flandre, la plantèrent & cultivèrent si curieusement, qu’en peu d’années les cayeux [the French term for the bulb’s offsets] & la graine leur donnèrent lieu d’en orner notre France, & ensuite tous les pays voisins’. From Flanders they arrived in Paris, possibly in the hands of M Cambier de l’Isle, around 1546. ‘Avant celles-là, il n’avoit rien paru en ce genre’, but having seen them, Paris went wild about them.26 The first Frenchman to raise good tulips from seed was a M. Lombard, who had begged a bulb, not a very good one, from a fellow grower called Laure. The flower that grew from Lombard’s bulb was ‘huilée’, dull and sombre, rather than striped in the vibrant, zinging colours that tulip growers so admired. From this unpromising stock, Lombard raised seedlings more splendid than anyone had ever seen in France. He guarded his tulips as jealously as M Laure had, but c1670, towards the end of his life, was persuaded to sell some of his bulbs to three other fanciers, de Valnay himself, M Desgranges and a lawyer called Caboud. They paid through the nose for them, but their judgement was sound; from Lombard’s seedlings rose the strong race of Flemish ‘breeders’ that later provided the building blocks for present-day Darwin tulips. Monstereul had dismissed the simple bordered tulips which ‘le sieur Bachelier’ (that is, Busbecq), brought out of Turkey as suitable only for decorating dishes of food. These early-flowering tulips, as growers soon discovered, were not capable of ‘breaking’.

  There were sound commercial reasons for the nurseryman Pierre Morin to add his own bit of trumpet-blowing to the general clamour surrounding the tulip. His Remarques Nécessaires pour la Culture des Fleurs, published by the unscrupulous Charles de Sercy in Paris in 1678, was a nursery list very lightly disguised as a book. Morin’s Catalogue of Flowers makes up a large part of the volume and lists 100 tulips, plenty enough, he wrote, to ‘remplir un carreau’ or fill ‘une planche de médiocre grandeur’. Hi
s two favourites were the yellow and brown ‘Amidor’ and ‘Erimante’. John Rea, the English nurseryman who had published his Flora only a few years before, also knew ‘Amidor’, describing it as among the ‘pretty flowers which arose from good self colours which the French call “Bizars” and we ‘Trench modes”.27 Morin justified the list by saying that it was ‘pour faire connoitre aux Curieux, qui (estant éloignez d’ici et n’en pouvant avoir les portraits) sont désireux de savoir qui sont celles que nous estimons à Paris’. His list includes the first mention of a tulip with variegated foliage, the white-flowered ‘Ondée’ with leaves that were also ‘godronnées et environées’ in white. Most of his tulips are late-flowering kinds such as ‘Paragon d’Acosta’, a white flower ‘panachée’ with purple and gris-de-lin. As far as tulip fanciers were concerned, this combination represented the height of chic; purple and white breaks, which do not feature in the earliest illustrations of tulips, became the sine qua non of tulip style. Morin’s ‘Brabanconne’ was made in the same mould: purple, milky-white with just the faintest smudge of red. The Dutch, said Morin, called their tulips after admirals and generals. In Paris, the fashion was to call them after kings, or sometimes after provinces or towns, as ‘La Florentine’, ‘La Lucoise’ or ‘La Turinoise’. One breeder gave all her tulips Roman names, another favoured painters. Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) was more random; no particular theme seems to link the tulips he bred and named ‘Jean Scime’, ‘Gagnepain’ and ‘Chancelière’.

  Where tulipomania reigned, the satirist was never far behind. Dutch fanciers were mercilessly ridiculed in cartoons such as The Fool’s Cap by Cornelis Danckerts and Jan Brueghel’s Allegory on the Tulip Mania, which showed monkeys dealing in bulbs. English florists were lampooned by Steele in the Spectator. French tulipistes had La Bruyère to contend with. The idle and the rich, he said, had to have their fads and fashions to ease the boredom of their lives. The tulip lover ‘at sunrise, hurries out to his garden in the suburbs, and does not come back till bedtime; you see him standing in the middle of his tulips as if rooted to the spot There is “La Solitaire”; he rubs his hands with delight; he bends down to kiss her; he has never seen anything so beautiful. He goes over to “La Veuve”, to “Drap d’Or” and “Agathe” but he comes back to “La Solitaire”; he will not part with her, no, not for a thousand crowns. Yet he is a person of good sense; he has a heart, he goes to church’.28