The Tulip

by Anna Pavord

  One of Rea’s patrons was Baron Gerard, of Gerrard’s Bromley, Staffordshire, for whose wife he had laid out the garden there. Rea evidently deemed it politic to include her in the dedication too. This he did in the form of a long, laudatory poem, which together with another preliminary poem, Flora to the Ladies, is full of coded references to flowers, especially tulips. ‘Agate Hanmer’ is there of course, ‘the Queen of all delights’, who

  Wears Graydeline, Scarlet and White

  So interwoven and so plac’d

  That all the other are disgrac’d.

  The poem makes clear that tulips of ‘Tyrian purple and fine white’ were far more highly prized than the red and yellow kinds:

  The meanest here you can behold

  Is cloth’d in Scarlet, lac’d with Gold.

  Rea suggests a design for a relatively modest garden with about forty square yards set aside for fruit and twenty square yards for flower beds. He recommended the building of a brick boundary wall at least nine feet high all round the garden, and another wall of about five feet to divide the fruit garden from the flower garden. He talks of bounding the square beds with painted wooden rails, or else with box trees or palisades for dwarf fruit trees. In the corners of the flower beds, he advised planting crown imperials, martagon lilies and peonies. ‘The streight beds are fit for the best tulips, where account may be kept of them. Ranunculus and Anemonies also require particular beds – the rest may be set all over with the more ordinary sorts of Tulips…’ He also thought the ideal flower garden should have ‘a handsom octangular somer-house roofed everyway and finely painted with landskips and other conceits furnished with seats about and a table in the middle which serveth not only for delight and entertainment but for many other necessary purposes as to put the roots of Tulips and other flowers in, as they are taken up upon papers’.

  Rea’s descriptions show what great attention was paid at this time to the culture of bulbs, especially tulips, even in relatively small gardens. Just over a hundred years after the first tulip had been seen at Augsburg, the number of varieties available had increased to 190. A distinction had already arisen between the best sorts and more ordinary kinds. Despite the political upheaval that had characterised the century, in mainland Europe as well as Britain, the flower was well known and widely cultivated. Tulips though were still thought of as foreign flowers – ‘French flowers’ Rea called them in his introductory paragraph on ‘The Flower Garden’. At this time, French and Flemish florists, growers and breeders played a more important part than the Dutch in bringing the tulip on and developing its potential, increasing its market value all the while. The flower garden, wrote Rea, should be fashioned ‘in the form of a Cabinet, with several Boxes fit to receive, and securely to keep, Nature’s choicest jewels’. Chief among these were the tulips, variously ‘Mixed, edged, striped, feathered, garded, agotted, marbled, flaked, or specled’. Descriptive vocabulary was stretched to keep up with the number of new tricks the tulip performed with the lazy, laid-back grace of a natural superstar.

  Rea describes several of the tulips that had caused havoc among the Dutch at the height of tulipomania. The most notorious were ‘Viceroy’ and ‘Semper Augustus’. ‘Viceroy’, he wrote, ‘is an old flower of a violet purple colour, edged, feathered and striped with white, the bottom and Tamis [stamens] of a greenish yellow colour; to the name of this flower Paragon is often added, as if it were a distinct kind, when it is but the same, better marked than usual.’ ‘Semper Augustus’ flowered mid-season. ‘Heretofore’ said Rea, this tulip had been ‘of much esteem’, the inference being that it had already been superseded by better types. The bloom itself was not very big, but it was beautifully veined and striped with deep crimson and pale yellow, set off against a base and stamens of dark violet-purple.

  Rea followed Gerard in grouping tulips into three classes, early, mid and late-flowering. Among the thirty-one early-flowering (Praecox) tulips he mentioned, Rea considered ‘The Superintendant’ one of the best. ‘It riseth higher than ordinarily others do; the flower is fair and large, excellently marked with violet purple and good white, the bottom and Tamis pale yellow.’ Only nine late-flowering kinds (Serotinas) are listed. By far the biggest group are the mid-flowering kinds (Media) and their names suggest that they are mostly of foreign rather than English origin. Rea was particularly keen though on a tulip called ‘Paragon Blackburn’, a tall-growing type with ‘a fair Flower with broad leaves [petals] yet sharp pointed, of light carnation colour, with some marks of deeper red, flamed and striped with white; the bottom and Tamis blue. This was raised by Mr Humphrey Blackburn, late keeper of the garden at York House in the Strand, from the seeds of the “Pass Oudinard”, as he told me when he gave me the root’ Rea also recommended ‘Rickets Fine Agot’, a beautiful flower, ‘striped, agotted and variously marked with rose colour, deep crimson and fine white’. Presumably, this had been raised by George Ricketts (fl. 1660s-1706), a nurseryman of Hoxton, Shoreditch, London, whom Rea called ‘the best and most faithful florist now about London’.

  He was not always so complimentary. ‘It is a trick much used by those who sell flowers about London’, he grumbled, ‘to add Paragon to the name of any common flower when it comes well marked and then impose a treble price’. Rea’s tulips cost between a penny and five pounds each. ‘Edgers’, that is the early-flowering kinds, were not as esteemed as the striped, feathered and flamed varieties, but ‘Winter Duke’ was deemed useful because it flowered before 10 March. The Dukes, Ducs, or Ducks (the spelling varied depending on which language the writer thought he was copying) were a distinct type of tulip which is still available as ‘Duc van Thol’ or other such Single Early tulips. They were low-growing, often distinguished by a clear, neat rim of contrasting colour around the edges of the petals. The most common types were red with yellow margins.

  As a nurseryman, it is not surprising that Rea had such a keen eye for detail in the flowers he described. Like later florists, he was much concerned with the beauty of the inside of the tulip, the differences between the size, shape and colour of the basal blotch, the various colours of the stamens, the distinctions in texture between the inside and the outside of the petal, the inner surface often being much more highly glossed than the outer. He noticed the tendency of the separate colours of some feathered and flamed flowers to run together in the sun. This was a problem that bothered later florists just as much. But he noticed, too, that the sun would sometimes bleach a pale yellow ground colour into a much more desirable (more highly regarded and therefore more expensive) white. His notes on tulips such as ‘Paragon Blackburn’ make it clear that organised breeding of tulips was now more common in England and that the beginnings of a tulip stud book were being put together, as growers kept records of the parentage of their new seedling varieties. Some new tulips were chance breaks from other, more established varieties, but a number of seedlings were also being raised, bred as ‘Paragon Blackburn’ had been, from tulips that were judged to be the best of their particular group. Rea put his finger on another reason for the flower being taken up so enthusiastically by commercial nurserymen. It was ‘aptly conveyable (the season considered) many miles distant’.

  By the time a new edition of Rea’s work was published in 1676, the taste for tulips and other florists’ flowers had trickled down from the aristocracy and gentry to capture gardeners of all kinds. The best bulbs may have been expensive, but the seeds could be free, and not difficult to get hold of if you had a friend who was a gardener at one of the big houses in the district. Few didn’t, when communities were small and garden workers rather thick on the ground. Those who were not rich had to be patient and wait the seven years that it took to raise flowering-size bulbs from a pod of tulip seed. The number of tulips listed in the second edition of Rea’s book increased to 300, mirroring the increasing demand for the flowers, which peaked in popularity between 1680 and 1710. Rea died in 1677, followed only a year later by Sir Thomas Hanmer. With their deaths, the first pio
neering chapter of tulip-growing in England came to an end, just as the flower itself began to explode into general favour.

  Rea left his plants to Samuel Gilbert, who had married his daughter, Minerva. Gilbert was rector of Quatt in Shropshire and also chaplain to Jane, wife of Charles, the fourth Baron Gerard, celebrated in the preface to Rea’s book. Gilbert was better placed than his father-in-law to exploit the new craze and his Florist’s Vade mecum (1682) was wildly successful. He recommended a tulip garden with beds divided into squares, each division to be planted with a separate variety. He was the only author of the time to recommend plants (amaranthus, marvel of Peru and nasturtiums) to fill the gaps left when tulips had finished flowering. Seventeenth-century gardens peaked in spring and early summer; there were relatively few plants available that flowered later in the season.

  Andrew Marvell, the poet, was one of many who lamented the settled times before the Civil War. ‘Shall we never more / That sweet militia restore,’ he asked,

  When gardens only had their towers

  And all the garrisons were flowers?

  Tulips in several colours barred

  Were then the Switzers of our guard13

  With the restoration of Charles II, the settled times briefly returned (until the Jacobite rebellion) and nurserymen benefited mightily. Roger Looker, who had started his career as a gardener at Hatfield House, later found it more profitable to set up a nursery at St Martin’s in the Fields, London. In September 1684, he supplied the Marquis of Bath at Longleat with 4,000 crocus roots for £2, 1,000 best mixed tulips for £5 and 1,000 second-best mixed for £2 10s. George Ricketts, the Hoxton nurseryman who had bred ‘Rickets Fine Agot’, was busy too. In 1689, he sent mulberries and apples, spruce and cypress to Levens in Westmorland. Included in the order were ‘100 lilys (white) of Constantinople, 50 Campernello, 200 Good Tulipps mixt, 100 Ranunculus’. The lilies were 12s., Campernello 4s., Tulips £1 4s., Ranunculus £1. At this stage, lilies and tulips were roughly equal in price, while ranunculus, a very popular florists’ flower, were more expensive. Thirty black cherry trees in the same order cost only 10s. Ricketts, one of three nurserymen based in Hoxton at the time,14 offered a very wide variety of plants. His 1688 Catalogue was divided into several sections: ‘Greens that are Housed in the Winter’; ‘Flower Bearing Trees’; ‘Winter Greens’; ‘Other Ornamental Trees’; ‘Flowers and Choice Plants’ under which are listed ‘Tulips great variety’. Florists were flourishing too. It was around this time that the London Floral Feasts started, set up by Thomas Wrench (c1630–1728), auricula grower and nurseryman of Fulham.

  Nurserymen prospered. Some of them, such as George London, became rather grand. London teamed up with Roger Looker and others to start the famous Brompton Park Nursery, Kensington in the 1680s, but by 1694 had bought out the others and established himself with Henry Wise as his sole partner. His daughter, Henrietta, contributed some of the drawings of plants in the Duchess of Beaufort’s collection. George London was involved in designing and creating many of the best gardens of the time, including the Beauforts’ garden at Badminton and the Duke of Devonshire’s place at Chatsworth. Tulips in their borders were planted according to the same formal, grid-like arrangement that Dezallier-d’Argenville was advocating in France.

  London and Wise recommended that the gardener ‘ought first of all to draw Rills upon his Borders, four inches distant from one another longways and crossways, so that the Borders being thus laid out may form a sort of Grate’.15 The system, though rigid, had practical advantages. The grid provided an easy way of recording what was growing where. At lifting time (all tulip bulbs were lifted and dried off when they had finished flowering ready for replanting the following autumn), one bulb looked exactly like another, yet it was vital that the bulbs should be distinguished, for there was a vast difference in price between the stars and the also-rans. Offsets – the small bulblets – of very expensive tulips were carefully hoarded, for they provided the only reliable way to bulk up stock of named tulips. The virtuoso John Evelyn went one step further in grid planting. In his unpublished manuscript, Elysium Britannicum, an illustration shows a ready-made lattice which, pressed on the earth, made a planting grid for tulips and other bulbs. Evelyn credited the bulb-crazy French with inventing the device, which was six feet long and three feet wide (1.8m X 0.9m), each square ‘at competent distance for bulbous rootes’. Using this, the gardener could ‘avoide the frequent removing of the line’.

  By the time the essayist and dramatist Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729) contributed his teasing piece about tulips to the Tatler (31 August 1710), the hyacinth was already beginning to outstrip the tulip in popularity. But Steele knew his readers would understand the tulip jokes, even if they were at their expense. The flower had become a nation-wide phenomenon, appearing on furniture and fabrics, silver and all kinds of ceramics from lead-glazed Staffordshire posset pots to tin-glazed Southwark dishes. ‘I asked them to let me be one of their company,’ wrote Steele. ‘The gentleman of the house told me, if I delighted in flowers, it would be worth my while; for that he believed he could show me such a blow of tulips, as was not to be matched in the whole country. I accepted the offer and found that they had been talking in terms of gardening, and that the Kings and Generals they had mentioned were only so many tulips, to which the gardeners, according to their usual custom, had given such high titles and appellations of honour… I accidentally praised a tulip as one of the finest I ever saw; upon which they told me, it was a common Fool’s Coat… He told me that he valued the bed of flowers which lay before us and was not above twenty yards in length and two in breadth, more than he would the best hundred acres of land in England.’ Florists and the puffed-up names that they gave to their flowers were an easy target for a satirist. Given the prices that were now being paid for tulips, growers, said Steele, must be suffering from an illness, a distemper, which affected their minds and judgement

  Undeterred, gardeners continued to plant. At the Manor of Little Crosby in southwest Lancashire, Nicholas Blundell put ‘Anemonyes, Pilianthes, Geliflowers, Arenunulases, Riclasses and Tulops’, each in its own bed in the knot garden which he had started to make in front of the dining-room window of the manor. Blundell succeeded to the Lordship of the Manor in 1702, when he was thirty-two, starting at the same time a diary, his Great Diurnal, which he kept for the next twenty-five years. He mentions ‘Ordinary Tulops’, by which he probably means the cheaper, early-flowering kinds and also ‘Forrain and York’ tulips. By this time, York had established itself as an important centre of supply for northern growers, and there were good nurserymen there such as Samuel Smith, who, on 7 and 14 April 1730, advertised in the York Courant the fact that at his flower garden without Mickle-gate Bar was to be seen ‘a choice Collection of Auriculas, Animonies, Renunculos, Tulops and other Flowers’ all available for sale at reasonable rates.

  The ‘Forrain’ tulips came from Flanders, familiar ground to Blundell, who had been a pupil at the Jesuit College at St Omer. In the wake of the Jacobite rebellion he fled back to Flanders in 1716, and visited Ghent, Bruges, Brussels and Liège. From 1717 onwards, he made frequent visits to Flanders as his daughters were also being educated there. In his diary he records the various bulbs he brought back from his travels. On 21 October 1717 he planted the ‘Anemonys, Renunculus and Tulops which I brought out of Flanders’. On 28 April 1720 he noted that he had thirty-three different sorts of tulip in bloom and in July of that year set 1,500 tulip bulbs and their offsets in his Nursery of Flowers. Planting and lifting times mostly correspond with today’s dates, although on 22 July 1715 he ‘set two beds in the Knot…tis too early by some months’. In 1727, he planted more correctly on 30 October putting ‘Tulops in the four hearts [of the knot] & in the New Flower Pots at the Side of the Canall’.16

  The next thirty years saw the beginning of a slow divorce between the tulip and the garden. The problem was not the craze for hyacinths, because these were used in much the same way as the tulip had
been, planted in formal rows or to decorate knots and parterres. The real problem, especially from the 1730s onwards, was the changing taste in garden design, which both reflected and encouraged a different kind of planting. Glasshouses became an increasing obsession, along with the tender plants that could be grown in them. Trees and shrubs from America began to be imported in vast quantities. Above all, the flower-filled parterre and the knot were banished in favour of ‘Capability’ Brown’s green swards which lapped right up to the walls of houses such as Petworth and Burghley. The ha-ha arrived to make the smoothest of transitions between the garden and the landscape which it imitated. ‘Landskips’, such as those that Rea had suggested in 1665 be painted on the walls of the garden ‘somer-house’ that was to provide a summer store for tulip bulbs, now replaced the garden itself. The great arboriculturist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had prophesised the sea change a hundred years before; the poet Milton (1608–1674) had been its herald and now the poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and the work of the architect, painter and garden designer William Kent (c1685–1748) glorified a style that had very little to do with flowers such as tulips and everything to do with images of a classical past. It was exemplified in the new gardens laid out at Claremont in Surrey, Chiswick House on the western outskirts of London, Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Badminton in Gloucestershire, where in the late seventeenth century the Duchess of Beaufort had built up such a fine collection of flowers.