by Anna Pavord
A contemporary of the Flemish painter, Joris Hoefnagel, de Morgues was born in Dieppe, a centre renowned for its cartographers and illuminators. When he was about thirty years old, he set sail from Le Havre as cartographer and artist/recorder on René de Laudonniere’s exploratory expedition to Florida. In September 1565 Spaniards overran the Huguenot colony in Florida, but de Morgues escaped and returned to France. By about 1580 he had settled amongst other Huguenots in the parish of St Anne’s, Blackfriars, London, and was granted letters of denization on 12 May 1581. A return of aliens living in Blackfriars, dated 28 April 1583, describes him as ‘James le Moyne, alias Morgan, paynter, borne under the obezance of the Frenche kinge, and his wife, came for religion, and are of the French church, denison ij years’.4 Like Joris Hoefnagel, de Morgues occupied the shifting ground where illustration turned into something more like art. While he was living in Blackfriars he produced La clef du champs (1586), a little pattern book of woodcut illustrations of plants, possibly using the press of a fellow Huguenot, the scholar-printer Thomas Vautrollier. De Morgues had some powerful patrons: Sir Walter Raleigh and Lady Mary Sidney whose son, Sir Philip, had been in touch with Clusius on his journeys to England. An impressive picture emerges of an extensive intellectual network of plant lovers in the second half of the sixteenth century which embraced Flemings, Huguenots, Englishmen – Clusius, Dodoens, Gerard, Gesner, Hoefnagel, de Morgues, Lobelius – in places as far flung as Antwerp, Leiden, London, Prague, Strasbourg and Vienna. The tulips that de Morgues painted may have been familiar to him before he arrived in England. More likely, he saw them in James Garrett’s garden at London Wall, or Lobelius’s at Lime Street, both within a short walk of Blackfriars. Garrett was a friend of Clusius’s too, who mentioned him at least nine times – always in terms of commendation and esteem – in his last book Rariorum plantarum Historia (1601). Perhaps it was he, rather than Lobelius, who sent Garrett his first tulips.
By the time Garrett, the first of the English tulip fanciers, died in 1610, the tulip was well established as a favourite flower of Jacobean gardens, though it was ignored by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who managed to cram a herbaceous border full of other flowers into his poems and plays. But at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, the 1st Earl of Salisbury was only one of the rich landowners of seventeenth-century England to plant tulips in his parterres. You had to be rich to take part in this particular fancy. On 3 January 1611, the Earl’s gardener, John Tradescant, sent in his bill for ‘Routes, flowers, Seedes, trees and plants by him bought for my Lo: in Holland’.5 His list includes roses, anemones, quince, two Naples medlar trees, Iris susiana and – from Haarlem – 800 tulip bulbs at ten shillings the hundred. The cost of the tulips alone was equal to a gardeners’ half-yearly wage. The expenditure was not quite as extravagant as the Margrave of Baden-Durlach’s, but it was still a remarkable sum to part with for plants that were so prone to attack by mice and slugs, so ready to rot in England’s wet and clammy soil. But novelty prevailed. Tradescant may also have brought back Russian tulips for Hatfield, for he was in Archangel in 1618 and was well aware that ‘thear groweth in the land both tulipes and narsisus’.
Thirty years or so after Gerard had brought out his Herball, the apothecary John Parkinson published his huge compendium of plants Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris. The book with its punning title stood with the Herball as one of the great pillars of seventeenth-century botany. In the intervening years, Gerard’s fourteen tulips had swelled tenfold. Gerard had loosely grouped them by their flowering times, but Parkinson could not get off so lightly. By the time he came into print, gardeners and nurserymen had begun to give tulips varietal names. Given its brilliantly anarchic character, its ability to bounce up one spring wearing an entirely different coat from the year before, this was a hopeless enterprise. But Parkinson tried, listing among others a ‘Gingeline’, a ‘Testament Brancion’, a ‘Red Flambant’, a ‘Purple Holias’, a ‘Crimson Foole’s Coate’, a ‘Greene Swisser’, a ‘Goliah’, a ‘Stamell, dark or light’, a ‘Prince or Bracklar’. ‘These doe flower’ he says, ‘some earlier, some later, for three whole moneths together at the least, therein adorning out a garden most gloriously, in that being but one kinde of flower, it is so full of variety as no other…doe the like besides.’
Purity of form, the one great over-riding criterion of later English tulip fanciers, was not so important to the early growers as distinct colour breaks and unusual markings. Parkinson noted the tulip’s ‘stately aspect’ but the ‘admirable varietie of colours’ was its chief asset in the cabinets of horticultural curiosities that seventeenth-century gardeners marvelled at. By the rigorous standards of nineteenth-century florists, these tulips were fatally flawed: long-petalled, loose in shape, often showing gaps between the petals, the whole flower rarely forming the neat cupped shape that was later deemed to be the acme of perfection of the English florists’ tulip. But the early tulips were rare, therefore precious.
Parkinson had the edge on Gerard. Not only was Paradisi in Sole a better-informed book, it was also better illustrated. Tulips appeared prominently on the illustrated title page, one sitting in the centre of the Garden of Eden, another flanking a pineapple. It is evident from Parkinson’s engravings that the ‘broken’ tulips, feathered and flamed in patterns as diverse as fingerprints, were the types that were chiefly admired and that in the thirty years between Parkinson and Gerard, the flower had developed enormously. Even Parkinson, who tried so hard to pin labels onto the errant tulip, had to admit defeat in the end. ‘But as to tell you of all the sorts of Tulipas (which are the pride of delight)… doth both passe my ability, and as I beleeve the skill of any other,’ he said. ‘Besides this glory of variety in colors that these flowers have, they carry so stately and delightful a forme, and do abide so long in their bravery…that there is no Lady or Gentleman of any worth, that is not caught with this delight, or not delighted with these flowers’ – except Thomas Fuller.
Parkinson suggested that tulips should be planted so that their colours resembled a piece of curious needlework or a painting. The Stoke Edith tapestries at Montacute House in Somerset show the prevailing style: tulips planted in narrow borders around the edge of lozenge-shaped beds, each with a fountain in the centre. They make double rows, as do the carnations that are lined out in another narrow strip bed alongside grass. Neatly clipped balls and cones of evergreen box or yew are planted at regular intervals along the walks and fan-trained fruit trees are spread-eagled against the red brick wall that forms the boundary of this tapestry garden. The same formality is evident in the group portrait of the Capel family (Arthur Capel, 1st Baron of Hadham 1604–1649, Elizabeth, Lady Capel and their five children) painted by Cornelius Johnson c1640. The Capels are posed in the formal garden at Little Hadham, Hertfordshire, which lies behind them. There are broad gravel sweeps with fountains in the centre of curved quadrants. Urns decorate the balustrades. The two urns behind Elizabeth’s head are filled with tulips, blue (unlikely), white, yellow and orange.6
When Parkinson published his Paradisus, the word ‘florist’ was already being used to describe the cultivators and admirers of a certain group of flowers.7 The group included the anemone, auricula, carnation, polyanthus and ranunculus, as well as the tulip. Later, pinks and pansies were added to the collection. Four of these flowers, the anemone, the carnation, the ranunculus and the tulip, were already being eagerly collected and bred by the middle of the seventeenth century. All florists’ flowers had blooms that were best admired at close quarters; all were capable of being developed and diversified by patient cross-breeding. Although in Paradisus Parkinson addressed his remarks about the culture of tulips to ‘gentlewomen for their delight’, the florists’ societies in existence from the middle of the seventeenth century were almost exclusively male preserves. Nevertheless, several women such as Mary Capel (holding roses in Johnson’s group portrait) became distinguished horticulturists. After her marriage to the Duke of Beaufort, Mary Somerset, as she
became, made botanic gardens at Badminton and Chelsea which were praised everywhere for the excellence of their plants, drawn from all quarters of the earth. The garden at Beaufort House, Chelsea had its ‘Bedd of Tulips with Bedd of Batchelers Buttons’. There was also a raised walk, the Mount Walk, leading to a banqueting house which had a border of tulips on either side. Many named auriculas and tulips appear in the Hortus Siccus made from flowers grown by the Duchess of Beaufort and she also commissioned an important series of flower drawings to document her collection.8
Alexander Marshall (c1625–1682) was rich enough to be able to paint for his own amusement, rather than on commission. His flower album, collated from c1659 onwards, was one of the wonders of the age, the English equivalent of Nicolas Robert’s work for the Duc d’Orléans. John Evelyn saw it on 1 August 1682 when Marshall was staying with Bishop Compton at Fulham Palace, London. From his garden in Wimbledon, Lambert, the mutinous Roundhead general, sent a Guernsey Lily for him to paint. The royal gardener John Tradescant begged him to ‘limn in vellum’ some of the plants in his Lambeth garden. Three fine red and white tulips, accredited by Marshall to The Widow Lancsel are set on a page with heartsease, leucojum and a double pink anemone. The name sounds Dutch or perhaps Flemish, but most of the tulips Marshall painted had French names, like his delicate ‘Prunelle’, finely feathered with red on a white ground, or the more randomly marked ‘Agatte Robin’ named perhaps after the French nurseryman, Pierre Robin. A yellow tulip finely striped in red is called ‘Chamelotte’ by Marshall, the name perhaps coming from an Arab term used to describe the pile on velvet. The texture of a tulip’s petal was an important part of its charm.
The bulbs, though, were still unfamiliar enough at this time to be misused. Parkinson had written that ‘divers have had them sent by their friends from beyond the sea, and mistaking them to be onions, have used them as onions in their pottage or broth, and never found any cause of mislike, or any sense of evil quality produced by them, but accounted them sweet onions’. Like Clusius, Parkinson also tried eating them; he preserved the bulbs in sugar and thought them pleasant, though hardly worth the trouble. They would not have made this mistake in Norfolk, where there had been Flemish refugees, well versed in the culture of bulbs, since the mid sixteenth century. They had brought gillyflowers, Provence roses and carnations with them, as well as tulips. Many of them were weavers and some settled in Norwich, where later, in the early seventeenth century, the first florists’ feasts were held. The light, free-draining soil of East Anglia (which Dutch engineers had helped rescue from the Wash) was well suited to growing bulbs such as the tulip. Ruth Duthie’s pioneering work9 into the history of the florists’ societies indicates that the first florists’ feast was held at Norwich on 3 May 1631, where guests were entertained by Ralph Knevet’s play Rhodon and Iris.10 The play was dedicated to Nicholas Bacon of Gillingham, who was said to be ‘fervently addicted to a speculation of the virtues and beauties of all flowers’. There is no specific mention of tulips, though the date (equal to 14 May in the present calendar) would have caught the peak of their flowering. Knevet addressed the preface of his play to ‘his much respected friends the Society of Florists’, and referred to the ‘feast celebrated by such a conflux of Gentlemen of birth and quality in whose presence and commerce (I thinke) your cities welfare partly consists’. The Feast got the florists into trouble with the Norwich Puritans, who disapproved of such carousings, in part because they were dedicated to the pagan goddess Flora. William Strode, chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich in 1632, tried to put things right in A Prologue crown’d with Flowers on the Florists’ Feast at Norwich11 but these were hard times for those who worshipped at the altar of beauty rather than utility. Parkinson’s celebratory Paradisus had been published in the very same year that Parliament first rose up against the King.
Strode’s Prologue mentioned tulips. So did Matthew Stevenson in At the Florists’ Feast in Norwich. Flora Wearing a Crown, which commemorated the same society of florists fourteen years later.12 ‘Had yee but met when Tulops were in towne,’ he wrote, ‘She then had given you every one a crowne.’ The Norwich florists did not appear to be cowed by the Puritans, but while the Commonwealth was in place, many Royalists escaped abroad or slid quietly away to their country estates, kept their heads below their hedges and, like Sir Thomas Hanmer of Bettisfield, Flintshire, cultivated their gardens. But even some flower-loving Puritans fell foul of their master. One of Cromwell’s commanders, General Lambert, who had refused in 1657 to take an oath of allegiance to the Roundhead leader, was forced to retire to his manor in Wimbledon where he occupied himself growing tulips and gillyflowers. He is commemorated satirically in a pack of Royalist playing cards as ‘Lambert, Kt of ye Golden Tulip’. Lord Capel of Little Theobalds was actually a member of the Long Parliament, but was so shocked by the violence of the opinions expressed there, that he became a loyal supporter of the King. He escorted Queen Henrietta Maria to France in 1646 and helped Charles escape briefly in 1647, but he was taken prisoner at Colchester in 1648 and imprisoned in the Tower.
Some Royalists lost their estates. Theobalds, the Cecil’s great house in Hertfordshire, where forty years earlier John Gerard had gardened, was one of the great houses taken over (as Lambert’s Wimbledon Manor had been) by the Parliamentarians. Raphe Baldwyn surveyed Theobalds in April 1650, finding among other things ‘a quicksett hedge wch goeth round ye Garden, with a square knott in ye middle of ye Garden turned into a compleate fashion and shape, with 3 ascents, boorded and planted with Tulipps, Lillies, Piannies, and divers other sorts of flowers’.
Sir Thomas Hanmer took a few prudent trips abroad in the 1640s but in 1646, at the end of the Civil War, retired to his estate at Bettisfield, Flintshire which (unlike Wimbledon Manor and Theobalds) was too far from the centre of things to be of interest to the Parliamentarians. Hanmer was an almost exact contemporary of the French court painter Nicolas Robert. While Robert was painting glorious tulips such as ‘Jaspée de Haarlem’ and ‘Perroquet de trois couleurs’ for Gaston d’Orléans, brother of King Louis XIV, Hanmer was growing them in Flintshire. By the time of the Restoration, Hanmer was acknowledged as one of the most accomplished gardeners in the country, an expert, particularly, on tulips. And unlike his counterparts in the Netherlands, he had not been ruined by them. Between 1634 and 1637 tulipomania had reached a fever pitch in the Netherlands that is difficult to understand now. The Civil War brought one benefit: Roundheads and Cavaliers alike had been too preoccupied to gamble with bulbs. Hanmer’s love of gardening transcended politics. In June 1655, as he noted in his pocket book, he sent to General Lambert at Wimbledon ‘a very great mother-root of Agate Hanmer’. This was one of his best tulips, described by John Rea, a nurseryman of Kinlet in Shropshire, as ‘grideline [a greyish-purple], deep scarlet and pure white. This gallant tulip,’ wrote Rea, ‘hath its name from that ingenious lover of these rarities, Sir Thomas Hanmer, who first brought it into England, from whose free community myself and others partake the delight of this noble flower.’ John Evelyn had ‘Agate Hanmer’ too, sent by Hanmer on 21 August 1671 for his garden at Sayes Court, Deptford.
Hanmer’s Garden Book (completed in manuscript by 1659, but not published until 1933) paints a clear picture of the typical gentleman’s garden of the mid seventeenth century: parterres with the alleys between filled with coloured gravels, compartments and borders for flowers, trimmed evergreens, and perhaps for flower-lovers such as Hanmer himself a ‘little private seminary, to keep such treasures as are not be exposed to every one’s view’. Hanmer grew bear’s ears (auriculas), anemones, primroses, cowslips and gillyflower but his greatest favourite was the tulip, ‘the Queen of bulbous plants, whose flower is beautiful in its figure, and most rich and admirable in colour, and wonderful in variety of markings’.
Tulips grew in thirteen ranks of four in one of Hanmer’s flower beds on the right next to his house. Another thirteen ranks of four tulips were set in the boarded bed furthest from the house on
the left. In the border under the west wall by the door leading through to his courtyard he planted offsets of a wide variety of tulips and anemones. A catalogue of the contents of the flower garden at Bettisfield in 1660 seems chiefly concerned with tulips. Each bed is mentioned and every row of bulbs is taken separately with each bulb named: ‘Peruchot’, ‘Admiral Enchuysen’, ‘Angelica’, ‘Comisetta’, ‘Omen’, ‘Diana’, some of the ‘very good bearing rootes’ that in 1654 Hanmer had sent to his friend, Sir John Trevor.
He also left detailed notes on the way that tulips should be grown, recommending that they be set in the ground about the time of the full moon in September, planted four inches deep and the same distance apart. Already keen tulip growers, such as he, had identified the best kinds of tulips to propagate from seed, the kinds that would be most likely to ‘parrach’ or break. ‘Keep old strong roots for seed,’ he wrote, ‘such kinds as have blue cup and purple chives and are striped with pure white and carnations, or gridelines or murreys. The single colours with blue cups or bottoms and purple chives will most of them parrach or stripe and will stand two years unremoved when the roots are old.’ He may have picked up this information on his journeys into France and Flanders, where, at this stage, tulip-growing was more advanced than it was in England. The single-coloured tulips with the blue bottoms that Hanmer mentioned were later used as ‘breeders’ by English florists of the late eighteenth century, who ‘broke’ from them the beautiful feathered and flamed Bybloemen and Rose tulips that were shown in competitive classes throughout the country. Good breaks changed hands for remarkably high prices.
Tulips – 190 different kinds – featured prominently in Rea’s own book, Flora; seu de Florum Cultura, published in 1665. Broken tulips were already known, but now Rea described jagged-petalled Parrot tulips too, ‘very strange in fashion and colours from all others’. Rea dedicated his book to his friend, the ‘truly noble and perfect lover of ingenuity’, Sir Thomas Hanmer. The goddesses Flora, Ceres and Pomona (who provide the alternative title of the book) decorate the title page, Flora in the central position, holding a bunch of flowers which includes a tulip and a rose. Tulips are arranged in the fancy urns either side of her, along with peonies and crown imperials (Fritillaria imperialis).