The Tulip

by Anna Pavord

  Not all the old gardens were swept away. Levens Hall in Cumbria kept its topiary, a feature now universally reviled by those who threw in their lot with the landscape movement, and some gardeners, such as Henry Ellison of Gateshead Park near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, went on planting tulips. On 18 October 1729, he had from Henry Woodman, Nurseryman of Strand-on-the-Green, Middlesex, cherries and apricots, damask roses and Persian jasmines, ‘100 Ranunculus Common (5s.) and 100 good Mixt tulips (7s.6d.)’, so by this time, tulips had become more expensive than ranunculus. Forty striped lilies could be had for £2.17 At Goodwood in 1735, flowers for the border under the southeast wall included tulips in the third row of flowers with jonquils, sweet williams, rocket and columbines. Sir Thomas Parker, 1st Earl of Macclesfield (c1666–1732) was not afraid to proclaim himself a tulip man either, though he was buying earlier in the century than Ellison, when bulbs were not so much out of fashion. Parker, who was made Lord Chief Justice in 1710, acquired many of his bulbs from the nurseryman and gardener Thomas Greening, whose base was at Brentford in Middlesex. Parker paid Greening £20 for a small bed of tulips which he wanted for the garden he was making at Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire. The transaction is noted, not by Parker (or Greening) but by the Rev. George Harbin, first chaplain, then librarian to the 1st Viscount Weymouth at Longleat where his manuscript ‘Memoirs of Gardening’ covering the years 1716–1723 is housed.

  ‘Mr Cranke, The Parish Clark of Kensington, is very curious in his cultivation of carnations, Tulips and Ranunculus’, he noted on 2 November 1716. ‘He told me one Mr Greenhill [a slip – Harbin named Greening correctly later in the manuscript] had a share in ye same Garden with him, who delighted chiefly in Tulips in cultivating of wch. he had spent above 30 years and had at length arrived to that perfection that he had certainly the best collection in England and wd. not take under £10 for some single Roots… About ye beginning of November, he makes his beds for Tulips and setts them. The beds are composed of a mixture of sea-sand (whose Saltnesse is very beneficial) and also of Rich fresh loam or earth… When a Tulip breaks (i.e. wn. from a plain Breeder it first appears striped) it is not valued if it does not hold its colours at least three years.’ The finest tulips, wrote Harbin, were those raised from Dutch ‘breeders’, the ‘breeders’ being the plaincoloured flowers which occasionally produced the ‘breaks’, the fine feathered and flamed varieties that tulip fanciers so admired. ‘Those wch. Mr Greening most esteem’d are raised from the plain Buff-colour. The plain Peach-colour’d ones are called by ye Dutch Baquette primo. Our Gardiners now sell as good Breeders of their own raising, as we used to send to Holland for formerly. The Tulips with pointed leaves [petals] at top, as ye mourning Widow and Fools-Coats, are not now esteemed. Those whose leaves are broad and round at top are most valued and whose cups open well and wch. are white in ye bottom (within side) of the Purplish sort.’

  Harbin’s memoir shows how firmly the flower was now in the hands of the florists, who were boxing and coaxing it to fit an increasingly rigid set of rules. The pointed petals which had been a marked characteristic of the tulips originally brought in from the East were now less desirable than petals with a rounded outline, the product of nearly 200 years’ patient breeding and selection. White bases were much more to be encouraged than yellow or black ones, a tenet that still holds good among the few discerning florists who have continued to cultivate the English florists’ tulip to the end of the twentieth century. When Harbin was writing, florists included a great many nurserymen. Increasingly, the tulip was seen as a specimen, like a moth or a sea shell, a single entity, which could be grown and displayed for its own sake, not necessarily in a garden setting. Previously, tulips had not been dissociated in this way, but had been grown as one of a series of jewel flowers to be displayed in well-designed cabinet-gardens. Now, too, the tulip lost its foreignness. The accession of the Dutch King William and his Stuart Queen Mary to the English throne had of course facilitated trade between the Netherlands and Britain, but during the wars with the Dutch, English tulip breeders, as Harbin noted, became increasingly bullish about the value of their home-bred flowers – as good, they believed, as anything to be seen abroad.

  The growth and popularity of florists’ societies were helped greatly by the growth and popularity of newspapers. From the early years of the eighteenth century onwards, societies advertised their meetings and shows in newspapers and newspapers carried reports of society proceedings. Norwich was one of the first provincial towns in England to have its own paper, the Norwich Gazette, which on 28 June and 5 July 1707, carried details of ‘The Florists Feast, or Entertainment for Lovers of Flowers and Gardens’ which was to be held at ‘Mr Thomas Riggs in St Swithin’s Lane on Tuesday the 8th day of July next’. Tickets cost half a crown, so Mr Riggs was evidently expecting some well-heeled florists. On the 29 June 1724, the Gloucester Journal advertised a General Meeting of the Society of Florists and Gardeners the following week ‘at Ten in the Forenoon at William Ball’s at the Spread Eagle in Ross’.

  The age was defined by a huge thirst for knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, and this showed itself in an explosion of clubs and societies whose members met to discuss anything from the movement of the heavenly bodies to the circulation of the blood. Slowly, people were trying to sort, order and understand the natural world. Some societies were rather grand, like the Botanical Society of London which met every week at the Rainbow Coffee House, Watling Street. It had some illustrious members: Johann Jacob Dillenius, the first Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford and Philip Miller, curator of the Physic Garden at Chelsea, who was the society’s President. Miller was also a fellow of the Royal Society, where he published a paper ‘On the Early Flowering of Tulips and Other Bulbous Plants When Placed in Bottles filled with Water’. He discovered what we now take for granted, namely that the system worked better with hyacinths and narcissus than it did with tulips. But this kind of activity was not confined to London. Societies, like newspapers, sprang up in provincial towns all over the country. In Lincolnshire, the Spalding Gentleman’s Society was founded in 1710. It was not specifically a florists’ society, but tulips, anemones, ranunculus and carnations were among the curiosities exhibited at their gatherings. The meetings began soberly enough with tea or coffee, but later a quart tankard of ale was provided, along with clean pipes, a chamber pot and a Latin dictionary.18

  The prevailing ethos – scientific, enquiring – had an effect on the way that flowers such as tulips were perceived at this time. They were still objects of beauty of course, and appreciated as such, but the way people wrote about them reflected a widespread and growing interest in the practical details of their culture and propagation. Increasingly gardeners, nurserymen, florists, began to ask the question ‘Why?’. Why did the tulip grow in some positions better than it did in others? Why did bulbs have to be lifted each year? And, the biggest question of all, why did tulips sometimes break into colours and sometimes not?

  Philip Miller exemplified the new, enquiring approach in his Gardener’s and Florist’s Dictionary. This came out in 1724, a forerunner of the great Gardener’s Dictionary, the first edition of which appeared seven years later. Dropping florists from the latter title was a smart move by Miller’s publishers, who would not want a hint of anything out-of-date to cling to this expensive and, they hoped, lucrative project. With easy familiarity, Miller passed on to his readers tips gleaned from the best tulip growers in Europe: François Beulinx, a florist of Brussels ‘who has raised many extraordinary fine Bisard tulips from seeds’, a ‘Gentleman of my acquaintance’ in Holland who knew more than most about the breaking of tulips. The emphasis was no longer on how tulips should be used in the garden. It was on how they should be cultivated. John Rea had grouped his tulips into three classes: early, mid and late-flowering, categories useful to the gardener. Miller used three different classifications, arising from the new status of the tulip as a florist’s specimen. He mentions ‘Bisards’ such as ‘Aigle Noir’, �
��Hippolyte’, ‘Iphigénie’, ‘La Belle Columbine’, ‘Lucifer’, ‘Semiramis’, which would all have been yellow tulips, feathered or flamed with red, brown or – if you were lucky – near-black. ‘Bisards’, or ‘Bizarres’, as they later became, formed one of the three classes of tulips to which florists’ flowers had to conform. The other two were Roses, white flowers feathered and flamed with pink and red and Bybloemens, white flowers marked with mauve, purple or black.

  The classifications and the rules that governed them were an inevitable result of the way that florists’ societies gradually developed. At the beginning, the feast seemed to be the chief raison-d’être of the florists’ gatherings, but then a competitive edge developed. Instead of bringing their flowers simply for other members to admire, florists began to vie against each other for prizes which were awarded to the best flower in each of the three classes. This could not have happened before the tulip and other florists’ flowers had reached the highly developed state they were in by the 1720s. The Craftsman for 16 April 1729 reported ‘a great Feast of Gardiners call’d Florists’ which was held at the Dog on Richmond Hill, near London for about 130 florists. After dinner, ‘several shew’d their Flowers (most of them Auriculas) and five ancient and judicious Gardiners were judges to determine whose flowers excell’d’. By 1738, the York Courant was offering the prize of a gold ring to the ‘best blown Carnation’ at a forthcoming feast. At this stage, auriculas and carnations were more commonly shown in competition than tulips, though advertisements for tulip shows appeared later, such as the one advertised in the Ipswich Journal on 7 and 14 May 1748, advertising a meeting on 17 May at the Rising Sun, Bury St Edmunds and the next day at the Swan in Needham Market. The event was billed as a show rather than a feast.19

  English florists, though increasingly breeding their own flowers, still modelled themselves to a great extent on their French and Flemish counterparts. But could it really have been true, as Cowell’s French correspondent, P Belandine, said, that the prevailing fashion in France was to encode the colours of a tulip in the name that it was given, ‘Bonne Veuve’ being white (blanc) and violet? The nurseryman John Cowell (fl. 1690s-1730), famed for the huge aloe he grew at his nursery in Hoxton, London, thought so. The tulips Cowell liked best were either ‘Grideline colour’ (one of the colours of Sir Thomas Hanmer’s prize tulip ‘Agate Hanmer’), purple, violet or flesh-coloured. From these, he said, came the best breeders.

  Like his fellow nurseryman, John Rea, Cowell looked at flowers with intelligent curiosity. He noted that tulips with thin petals were more likely to break than others. He also grappled with the problems of cross-pollination. A friend of his had sowed seed of a ‘Baguet Primo’, a notable tall flower of a purplish colour, ‘from which’, wrote Cowell, ‘many a valuable Flower has been broke into Colours, or brought to stripe, even so valuable, as to be sold for a Thousand Guilders, Dutch money, one of them… The same seed produced Flowers of several Makes and different Colours when they first open’d. But according to the Philosophy of our Times, with regard to the Generation of Plants by coupling with one another, it might probably happen from that Cause, that the several Seedlings were so diversify’d…I wish some curious Gentleman would try the Parrot Tulips the next year, by planting the yellow and the red sorts together and save the Seeds from them, and sow them…these Couplings might bring a number of Rarities, if a little Care was taken to put them forward’.20

  Like all growers of the time, Cowell’s chief concern was with the ‘breaking’ of tulips. Already growers were aware that some types seemed more prone to break than others and that particular colours gave particularly good breaks. Samuel Trowell, Steward of the Estates of Benchers at the Inner Temple, London, had raised some promising tulips from seed of ‘Triumph of Europe’, a purple and white flower, finely feathered and recognised as one of the most constant in its markings and colours of any tulip around at the time. Cowell thought its constancy was due to the fact that its purple stripes were on the outside rather than the inside of the petals.

  The nurseryman James Maddock’s grand catalogue of 1742 finally stamped the tulip as a flower for specialist growers, perceived in much the same way as the show chrysanthemum is today. It listed 665 different kinds of tulip, the most expensive costing seventy-five florins a bulb. Maddock’s Walworth nursery, established after he moved south from Warrington, Lancashire c1770, later became a mecca for tulip lovers. The tulip, which in the sixteenth century had first intrigued botanists and apothecaries with its strangeness and novelty had then been enthusiastically taken up by the aristocracy and gentry, who paid huge sums for new kinds to display in their borders and parterres. Now it had evolved into a hobby flower, but not before James Justice (1698–1763), Principal Clerk to the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh (and tulip maniac), had bankrupted himself in regular seventeenth-century style for the sake of his passion.

  Justice, with Philip Miller a fellow member of the Royal Society, was splenetic, opinionated, reckless with money, boastful, but in the end an endearing man. He made his first garden at Crichton, Midlothian, about three miles outside Edinburgh, and was there for more than thirty years. At the time it was considered one of the best gardens in Scotland. He was the first to fruit the pineapple in Scotland (perhaps the most expensive pineapple ever grown), went several times to Holland to study the culture of bulbs, was familiar with the Flemish grower, François Beulinx, whom Cowell had quoted as an authority on tulips, and spent a fortune at the Haarlem nurseries of Voorhelms and Van Zompell. They ‘always dealt very honestly by me’ said Justice unrepentantly, even though he sometimes paid fifty pounds for a single tulip bulb. He grew fabulous Bybloemen tulips such as ‘Rex Indiarum’, ‘Incomparable Brunon’, ‘Grand Roy de France’, ‘Reine de Congo’, ‘Triumphe de Lille’, ‘Parroquet Rouge’, and ‘Konig van Siam’. He was also mad about the once fashionable French Baguet Rigauds, rosy-purple on a white ground. ‘Fine large Flowers, very strong, and some of them so large, as when they are in Perfection of Bloom, they will contain an English Pint of Wine within their Petals or Flower Leaves’.21

  Practical experiments played an important part in the way Justice gardened. The impetus for these may have been competitive rather than altruistic, but whatever the motive, the experiments yielded results. He spent a long time devising a good compost for his beloved bulbs. ‘To make a soil…equal in goodness to this, for Hyacinths, Tulips, Ranunculus, and Anemonies and to make them blow and increase in the same way they do in Holland, is to most of our British Gardeners, a thing unknown.’ For his own compost, Justice gave directions as precise as a recipe for a fine fruit cake. The ingredients included one third of rotted leaves of trees, until then unthought-of as an element of mulches or composts. Like everyone else, he also worried away at the question of tulip breaking, deciding that here, too, the soil must be the answer. His solution, an expensive one, was to import not only his tulip bulbs from Holland, but a shipload of Dutch soil as well.22

  James Justice’s financial problems were already acute when, in June 1757, he was ousted from the Royal Society for not paying his annual subscription. Undeterred, he continued to use the magic FRS after his name and jauntily kept up a voluminous correspondence with a network of fellow plant enthusiasts. In 1758 he promised Lord Milton some tulips and ranunculus, adding in his letter detailed instructions about the proper way to prepare beds for them. ‘Amongst your Tulips you will have some Kings, Queens and other Great Personages and I hope you will give suitable Entertainment to these Great Folk.’23 By the time he died, five years later, he had lost his house and the fortune that had never been equal to the level of his spending on the garden. On Friday 9 September 1763 at ten o’clock in the morning, the flowers that had ruined James Justice were put up for auction: ‘all the finest kinds of Auriculas… hyacinths, bulbous iris and tulips, that are in either the English or foreign Catalogues, are to be exposed to sale, in Mrs Justice’s garden at Leith, in large or small parcels, as purchasers incline.’ Most of the fl
owers were bought by the local seed merchant, Drummond & Co, who had a shop opposite Libberton’s Wynd, Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. A month later, the Caledonian Mercury carried an advertisement for Justice’s flowers, available now from Drummond’s, and they were still being advertised by the same firm four years on: ‘Tulips, Double Italian polyanthus, narcissus…’ But the last of the great tulip growers of the old style had gone down in uncompromising fashion. If anything was worth bankrupting yourself for, tulips were.

  Chapter IV

  The Dutch and Tulipomania

  Though Holland and tulips now seem as synonymous as America and hamburgers, the Dutch cannot claim any of the firsts in the story of the tulip in Europe. The first bulbs were probably introduced by a Frenchman. Cargoes of bulbs arrived in Antwerp from Constantinople in 1562 long before they were shipped into Amsterdam. The first known flower bloomed in the garden of a merchant in Augsburg, Bavaria and was recorded by the Swiss botanist and physician, Conrad Gesner. But, once introduced, tulips spread quickly through the Seventeen Provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, in spite of the Civil War that shortly afterwards broke out. The war led to the setting-up of the Dutch Republic in the Seven Provinces of the north, where, around Haarlem, the first cultivation of tulips in The Netherlands began. By this time, Flemish breeders had already coaxed the flower to a level far removed from Councillor Herwart’s plain red species. Flemish flowers had fed the tulip mania in France, which was flourishing twenty years before the Dutch crashed under their own tulip madness. But the Dutch were stayers. By their industry and application in growing and selling bulbs, they ensured that they were the last, triumphant survivors in the tulip trade.

  The first tulip growers established their nurseries at the beginning of the seventeenth century along the Wagenweg and the Kleine Houtweg, south of Haarlem. For the first two decades of the century, tulips were mostly sold in large units. Whole beds, planted in formal ranks, would pass expensively into the hands of estate owners and their gardeners. As the initial stock bulked up, the market expanded, so that during the 1620s, customers could buy the cheaper, single-coloured varieties for twelve florins a pound, or even by the basket. But new ‘breaks’, bi-colours delicately feathered and flamed, commanded from the beginning the most extraordinary prices. The Dutch tulipomania of the mid 1630s was only the culmination of a process that had been going on ever since the first tulips were stolen from Clusius’s garden at Leiden.