by Anna Pavord
La Bruyère’s scorn did not deter Louis XIV from filling the Grand Trianon at Versailles with tulips. A planting plan of 1693 shows tulips, white narcissus and hyacinths planted in borders in a strict ABABAC rotation, where A equals tulips, B equals narcissus and C equals hyacinths. By this time, hyacinths had outstripped all but the rarest tulips in price and consequently had to be used more sparingly, but there was a vast collection of tulip cultivars in this Grand Trianon plate-bande. They made an appropriate backdrop to Louis XIV’s escapist entertainments: the Plaisirs de l’Isle Enchantée of 1664 or the Grand Divertissement Royal of 1668. They were the parties to be seen at, if you had any pretension to a place in smart society. By the giving or the with-holding of invitations to these Arcadian extravaganzas, Louis XIV gradually reduced the French nobility to a state of quivering dependence on his good favour. But his successor Louis XV was the greater plantsman and the showy florimania that had characterised Louis XIV’s tenure of Versailles gave way to a more serious collection of plants, especially exotics, and tulips lost their pre-eminent place in the display.
A thriving export business in tulips was built up in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Buyers in England, Holland and Germany sought out Agats such as the bi-coloured, short-stemmed ‘Agat Fenis da Costa’, ‘Agat Royal’ and ‘Agat Oriental’. The Agat family got their name from their resemblance to the semi-precious stone, a variegated, usually banded chalcedony. They snapped up the new Violettes, which were marked with purple or lilac on a white ground. They paid through the nose for Baguettes, flamed with red or purple which made a sharp contrast against the white background of the flower. The petals of the Baguettes were large and rounded, and the flowers often had thick and particularly long stems, sometimes more than 80cm in length. Developed first by Flemish breeders, these were amongst the most sought-after tulips of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The Fantasques held their ground with those who appreciated the featherings of red, purple or brown on the saturated yellow petals. The fabulous late-flowering Marquetrines, so loved by Monstereul, commanded extraordinary prices and remained for a long period the most fashionable tulip to be found in French gardens. The Flemish growers though, particularly those around Lille, were still considered preeminent in breeding and in producing flowers that would give good breaks. The secret seemed to be that they always worked with tulips that had either white bases bounded with blue, or blue bases, bounded in white.29
Antoine-Joseph Dezallier-d’Argenville (1680–1765), the Russell Page of his day, recommended tulips in many of the garden plans and planting schemes he prepared for his clients. His schemes were formal – box-edged beds in geometric patterns – and Dezallier’s plans often show tulips set in double rows close to the box edging of these parterres. The inner rows were made up of hyacinths and narcissus planted alternately. The general effect, he said, should be a ‘mélange émaillé de toutes sortes de couleurs’. The planting was formal, grid-like, an arrangement carried on to the present day in the tulip beds of English florists. Dezallier recommended planting a variety of early tulips for the spring garden and ‘Tulippes tardives’, or late tulips, for the summer garden, though gardeners would be lucky to have many tulips that lasted beyond the end of May.30
Trade in tulips gradually drifted away from the French to the Dutch. (Karl Wilhem, the eighteenth-century Margrave of Baden-Durlach, bought his bulbs from Holland rather than France.) However, the predominance of French culture and the general use of the French language in polite society – at least until the middle of the eighteenth century – ensured that France for a long time retained its pre-eminence as the fount of all knowledge on tulips. This is reflected in many of the names given to tulips of the period such as ‘La Couronne Impériale’, a showy double, white striped with bright red like ‘Mariage de ma Fille’. It is also borne out by the extraordinary succession of treatises on tulips that were published in France after the first anonymous Traité compendieux of 1617. Le Père d’Ardène’s Traité des Tulipes, published at Avignon in 1760, marked the end of the flood and, as it turned out, the end of the tulip’s dizzy reign at the court of the French kings.
As befitted his calling, d’Ardène made many pious remarks about the original nature of his work, comparing it favourably with the wicked plagiarisms that had preceded it. But his own work also drew heavily on Monstereul. The difference was that he acknowledged the fact Little seemed to have materially changed in the hundred or so years that separated the two books, except that tulips, in France as in England, were now securely in the hands of florists, specialist growers, much like the dedicated chrysanthemum and leek growers of northern England who still show their magnificant creations in competitive shows as arcane as anything in Monstereul’s writings. Competition was the new element that had entered the game. Not entirely free of the deadly sins, d’Ardène noted the secret thrill of possessing a tulip that aroused jealousy in all who saw it.
Although mostly concerned with the tulip as a florists’ flower, d’Ardène notes the appearance of seemingly wild (though more probably naturalised) tulips in France, both around Boulogne and in the mountains of the Auvergne. Other botanists, he says, had noted them near the towns of Montpellier (shades of Rondellet and his pupils?) and at Aix. Le Père d’Ardène says that he himself had seen wild tulips in several places ‘assez jolies dans la petitesse de leur taille’. These were yellow, stippled with red, yellow stippled with grey, sometimes yellow edged with red. They were probably either T. agenensis, T. australis or T. didieri. Tulips also grew abundantly in the mountains of the Gappençois.
Tulips, said d’Ardène, provided ‘quelques douceurs’ in the midst of man’s penitence and ‘certaines consolations’ in the midst of his work. The ‘douceurs’ and the ‘consolations’ however were not likely to be to the fore in dealings with other florists, where ‘tromperies odieuses’ were more the order of the day. The glossary which d’Ardène includes in his book shows how highly developed and specialised the language of the French tulip fanciers had become. Tulips might be glacées (that is, washed over on the backs of their petals with a colour paler than the ground colour) or huilée, stained, without lustre. Jaspée was a term applied to a particular type of tulip, like Robert’s ‘Jaspée de Haarlem’ in which the colours were not separated, but mingled together, rather as in the red, yellow or brown semi-precious quartz known as jasper. Rectifier was the longed-for state that came about when a tulip ‘broke’ and stabilised its newly broken colours in a feathered or flamed pattern acceptable to the highly critical eyes of the florists’ fraternity. The same term ‘rectified’ is still used by the Wakefield florists in Yorkshire, the last remaining group of English tulip fanciers to retain the traditions and the flowers of two centuries past.
Bizarres (yellow tulips striped with black, brown or red) had now become highly prized, said d’Ardène, but the further the markings moved away from red towards black, the better. The complicated Marquetrines marked with four or five different colours were not now so highly esteemed. With increasing sophistication, French florists realised that ‘c’est moins la multiplicité des couleurs que leur éclat et leur vivacité qui rend la Tulipe considérable’. Lowest of the low were the plain yellow tulips, but they would do in parterres, said d’Ardène or ‘sur le théâtre’.31 Whites were better than yellows, but the best were ‘cramoisie, pourpre, violet obscur, incarnadin vif’. The late varieties were much preferred to the earlies, because they were so much more diverse. But, said d’Ardène, some of his earlies bloomed before the end of February and were much in demand ‘à parer l’Autel’.
Whichever varieties you planted, it was important, as d’Ardène emphasised, to arrange them well. This not only gave the grower satisfaction but had the added benefit of earning the admiration of fellow florists on their ritual visits. Broken tulips should be planted next to plain ones, so that nothing could distract from the complexity of their markings. Like Dezallier, d’Ardène recommended planting in a stri
ct grid formation, the bulbs set five inches apart each way. When all the bulbs were set in their correct positions on the bed, then you began to plant. The flowers were generally thought to be too big and unwieldy for the delicate mixed posies fashionable at the time, so they were rarely picked. A hundred years earlier, they had been worn like jewels. Now, in their formal beds, the tulips continued to capture florists with ‘les entrelassements de leurs panachés; le lustre satiné de leurs feuilles; l’éclat brillant de l’or’. But d’Ardène’s book marked the end of French dominance in the tulip world. By the time France had emerged on the far side of its Revolution, the Dutch had taken over the show.
Chapter III
Early British Growers
There is lately a Flower (shall I call it so? in courtesie I will term it so, though it deserve not the appelation), a Toolip, which hath ingrafted the love and affections of most people unto it; and what is this Toolip? A well complexion’d stink, an ill favour wrapt up in pleasant colours: As for the use thereof in Physick, no Physitian hath honoured it yet with the mention, nor with a Greek or Latin name, so inconsiderable hath it hitherto been accompted; and yet this is that which filleth all Gardens, hundreds of pounds being given for the root thereof…’1 So you would not expect to find tulips in Thomas Fuller’s London garden, but his stand was as hopeless as a twentieth-century gardener railing against petunias. Flailing, contemptuous, dismissive, he was still a man swimming against the prevailing tide. Tulips had quickly swept through mainland Europe after their introduction from the East, and they also became the instant darlings of seventeenth-century gardeners in England. The speed and suddenness of the tulip’s conquest is borne out by the fact that, everywhere, it was known by the same (false) Turkish name. The flower that English gardeners and botanists called the tulip was known to the French as tulipe, to the Italians as tulipano, to the Spanish (and the Danish) as tulipan, to the Portuguese as tulipa, to the Dutch and Germans as tulpe and to the Swiss as tulpan. Fuller minded that the flower had never acquired a ‘proper’ Greek or Latin tag, but it had never acquired any common names either. Even though some species, such as T. sylvestris became naturalised in England and the rest of Europe, etymology suggests the tulip’s heart must be buried elsewhere.
It probably slipped into England during the early part of Elizabeth I’s reign (1558–1602), though it may have come earlier, arriving with the Flemish, Walloon and French refugees who from the 1540s onwards had been driven out of their own country by the depredations of Philip II. It may have been brought over by the Flemish botanist, Matthias de l’Obel (generally known as Lobelius), who came to London in 1570 and settled temporarily in a part of the city where Protestant refugees from France and the Low Countries had already been living for some time. His house was in Lime Street, where one of his neighbours was the apothecary James Garrett, also a Fleming (contemporaries described him as from ‘Belga’). Both men were early associates of John Gerard (1545–1612), physician, gardener and curator of the physic garden belonging to the College of Physicians. He also looked after Lord Burghley’s garden in the Strand and the garden at Burghley’s proto-palace, Theobalds in Hertfordshire. A contemporary portrait, painted when Gerard was forty-one, shows a wary, weasel-faced opportunist, the countenance made all the sharper by a neat, pointed beard. The slashed pantaloons and crazy, long-toed shoes suggest a dandy, as does the posy of pinks that Gerard is holding.
The first published mention of tulips in English crops up in Henry Lyte’s Nievve Herball or Historie of Plantes2 but he only repeated Dodoens’s vague belief that the tulip had been ‘brought from Greece and the countrie about Constantinople’. Twenty years later, Gerard was more specific. He says he got his tulips from Aleppo in Syria as did ‘Master Garth, a worshipful gentleman’. He also says that ‘his loving friend Master James Garrett…a curious searcher after simples and learned Apothecarie in London’ had been cultivating tulips for twenty years.3 This suggests that Garrett had been growing them since at least 1577, but how did he get hold of them? Did he get them from Lobelius when he arrived in London? Or had he been growing them even earlier, corresponding with and receiving seeds from Lobelius while he was still in Flanders? Being Flemish himself, language would have been no barrier to Garrett in the exchange of information. Latin, anyway, was the lingua franca of the time, particularly among botanists, who consequently could talk to each other more easily in the seventeenth century than they can in the twentieth.
Lobelius, while in the Low Countries, must have had news of the dramatic flowering of the tulip in Johannes Heinrich Herwart’s garden in Augsburg in 1559 and perhaps passed the news on to Garrett. Gerard writes that Garrett had ‘undertaken to find out, if it were possible, the infinite sorts [of tulip] by diligent sowing of their seeds, and by planting those of his own propagation and others received from his friends beyond the seas for the space of twenty years, not being yet able to attain to the end of his travail, for that each new year brought forth new plants of sundry colours not before seen, all which to describe particularly were to “Roule Sisiphus Stone” or number the sands’.
Since a tulip usually takes seven years to grow from seed to flowering bulb, this was long-drawn-out work, but Gerard considered Garrett one of the earliest and most successful growers of the tulip in the country. In his garden at London Wall, Garrett grew yellow, white, light purple and red (the most common) tulips. Gerard mentions specifically a tulip that was ‘a greater sort than the rest … a stalke a foot high or something higher, upon which standeth only one flower bolt upright’. The inference is that most of the tulips being grown at the time were less than a foot tall which suggests that, while perhaps not truly wild species, these Elizabethan tulips had not strayed very far from their low-growing wild parents. Garrett was collecting and sowing his own seed, but there is nothing in Gerard that specifically says that he was cross-pollinating different kinds.
Gerard’s Herball, now so well known, was very nearly Priest’s Herball, for John Norton, the printer, had originally commissioned it from the botanist Robert Priest, not as an original work, but a translation of another Dodoens’s book, Pemptades. Priest died before he finished the job and Gerard took over, adapting the Dodoensesque translation to something more closely modelled on the works of his friend Lobelius, who kindly and quietly corrected some of the worst howlers before publication. Gerard was a good publicist, but not a scholar. The first edition contained 1,800 woodcut illustrations, most of them lifted from an earlier Dutch herbal by Tabernaemontanus (later editions had familiar Plantin woodcuts). Six tulips were shown, and another eight described in the text, but as Gerard acknowledged, the family was a difficult one to pin down. ‘The chives or threads in the middle of the flowers, be sometime yellow, other whiles blackish or purplish, but commonly of one overworne colour or other, Nature seeming to plaie more with this flower, than any other that I do know.’
He portrayed the tulip as ‘a strange and forraine flower, one of the number of the bulbed flowers, whereof there be sundrie sorts, some greater, some lesser with which all studious and painefull herbarists desire to be better acquainted, because of that excellent diversitie of most brave flowers which it beareth’. Following the prevailing mode, he divided tulips into three different groups – early, late and mid-season – describing them as ‘Italian’, ‘French’, ‘timely-flowering’, ‘late-flowering’ or ‘blush-coloured’. One, cumbersomely titled ‘Tulipa media sanguinea albis oris’, Gerard calls the ‘Appleblossom Tulip’. His description brings to mind T. clusiana but the illustration shows a tulip of different outline to the narrow, chaste form of the Lady tulip. He talks about tulips being ‘striped confusedly’ which suggests that fancy feathered and flamed types were already well known. He talks too of a tulip ‘in our London gardens of a snow white colour, the edges slightly washed over with a little of that we call blush colour’.
As in mainland Europe, the early history of the tulip in England has to be interpreted as much by its absence as its presence.
No tulips occur in the beautifully detailed portraits of flowers that decorate early manuscripts, nor do they appear in English pictures of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. If they had been available, you would expect to see them for instance in the portrait of Sir Thomas More and his family painted in 1526 by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). All the totemic (and expensive) flowers of the period are there, arranged in three vases behind the family group. There are huge and showy irises, some beautiful pinks, aquilegias, lilies, but no tulips. But tulips do appear in a strange miniature, watercolour on vellum, showing A Young Daughter of the Picts, painted, probably towards the end of his life, by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c1533–1588). The girl stands chillily naked except for a sword slung round her waist on a chain. The landscape around her is barren, but symmetrically arranged like tattoos all over her body are flowers: single and double peonies, hollyhock, heartsease, double columbines, lilies, tazetta narcissus, cornflowers, rose campions, yellow horned poppies and splendidly anachronistic Iris susiana and tulips, only recently introduced into England. Two plain red tulips decorate her knees, two plain yellow ones curve round the contours of her thighs. Is this the first picture (as distinct from illustration) of tulips to have appeared in England? Tantalisingly, it bears no date.