The Tulip

by Anna Pavord

  Van Kampen dealt with the hyacinth first, then the tulip, followed by the ranunculus and anemone, the order reflecting quite accurately the relative importance of these flowers at the time (and also the order in which van Kampen listed the flowers in his own catalogue). In terms of cultivation, van Kampen had little to say that van Oosten had not already made clear in The Dutch Gardener, but the English translation makes some nice distinctions between the tulip fanciers of Europe. ‘The florists of different countries have very different methods of distinguishing their flowers. The English bestow upon them the titles of the British nobility etc. and hence it is that several sorts have the name… They sometimes indeed add to their names that of the person who raised them, which is a tolerable good method to prevent the confusion arising from the scarcity of their names.

  ‘The French distinguish their flowers by numbers only, or at the most by the name of the principal colour, but this method occasions too much confusion, because a great number of different flowers may have the same denomination.

  ‘The method practised by the Hollanders is preferable. They not only denominate their flowers from the principal colours, but also add the names of the bravest generals, the gods, goddesses, nymphs, illustrious persons… They also bestow some names on them that denote their value.’

  Van Kampen recommends Tournefort as the authority for anyone who wants botanical names. He evidently doesn’t, and divides tulips into four main classes: early or spring tulips, double-flowered tulips, late expectant tulips and late striped tulips, with yellow or white bottoms. He talks of the fashion for forcing early-flowering tulips: ‘Due van Thol’, a scarlet tulip edged with yellow could be brought into flower by December.16 He named just two doubles, ‘La Couronne Imperiale’ and ‘Mariage de ma Fille’ both white, striped with red, rather like the modern variety ‘Carnaval de Nice’.

  Late expectant tulips were so called because tulip growers expected to raise fine new flowers from them. These were the plain-coloured flowers that English florists called ‘breeders’ and German florists called ‘Mutter Tulpen’. There were two sorts of late expectant tulips: Bizarres and Violettes. The tulips that produced the best striped Bizarres were plain brownish copper or dark fawn with a yellow-black basal blotch. The Violettes could be purplish-violet, pale violet, gridelin (a greyish colour), cherry-crimson, red, with a basal blotch of white or grey-blue mixed with white. The Violettes would later be broken into two separate classes, one covering the purple/violet end of the spectrum, the other the pinkish-red colours.

  The ‘breeders’ were not valued for themselves, but for their ability to ‘break’ into variegated feathers and flames. Van Kampen had as little idea as van Oosten about the cause of the breaking. Some florists tried to induce the process by cutting various bulbs in half and then binding different halves together. Van Kampen had noticed that broken flowers were not as vigorous as plain-coloured ones and so supposed that the breaking was caused by the weakness, although in fact it was the other way around. Planting in poor soil was one of his solutions. He also recommended that growers should vary the soil the bulbs were grown in, either by changing the soil itself, or by planting the bulbs in different parts of the garden. He even suggested that growers in other countries should import soil from Holland ‘which is the best way of all for foreigners’, advice followed to the letter by James Justice in Scotland.

  Van Kampen’s fourth group of tulips, ‘the variegated late blowers’ were, he said, ‘the most diversified, beautiful and perfect of all’. The Baguet Primo and the Baguet Rigaut tulips both had white flowers, striped with brown, the bases pure white. He places great emphasis on the tulip’s height, which he says should be between three and four feet (0.9m x 1.2m). The most highly valued and most sought-after tulips of the day were black, golden yellow, purple-violet, rose and vermilion. But, he says, ‘it sometimes happens that a flower of very great price degenerates and becomes of no value. There is no way to prevent this shocking metamorphosis for which nature alone is answerable; nor can the dealers in flowers, whatever care they take, prevent these grievous changes, on account of which they undergo so much vexation, and receive so many reproaches from the lovers of flowers, who not knowing what may happen, complain that the dealers have sent them roots which had degenerated the year before.’

  This seems a transparent case of special pleading but van Kampen goes on to describe ‘a very critical affair of this kind’ which had happened to himself. A florist had written to order tulips from him at a ducat a bulb. Van Kampen packed them up and sent them, but his customer complained bitterly when, at flowering time, his tulips came up and were far inferior to those he had been promised. He sent petals of the flowers to van Kampen, who agreed they were not as ordered and replaced them. ‘We concluded that the parcel must have been opened and the roots changed.’ The second time he sent each bulb wrapped in paper sealed with his own seal.

  Many of the best tulips were raised not in The Netherlands but in Flanders, especially around the towns of Gent, Valenciennes and Lille, where in 1538 one of the first of the tulip fanciers, Matthias de l’Obel (Lobelius) had been born. From these Flemish growers came mouth-watering beauties such as ‘La Somptueuse’ raised in 1772 by a florist called Boncomerre. His collection later passed into the hands of the Galliez family at Lille, whose ground was renowned for causing tulips to ‘break’ quickly. ‘Louis XVI’, the most celebrated tulip of the age, was also probably Flemish, raised in 1776 by an unknown amateur. He sold it to a commercial florist who in turn passed his collection to a Dunkirk innkeeper called Delezelles. It was offered for sale in Holland for the first time in 1789, appearing in the catalogue of the nurseryman M van Nieuwkerk at the astonishing price of 250 guilders a bulb.17

  The following spring, van Nieuwkerk invited his colleagues to come and admire the tulip in his garden. Even Schneevoogt and Kreps, who had the best collections in Holland, had to admit they were outgunned. Van Nieuwkerk told them he had got the bulb from his son who worked as a gardener at Bagatelle, the Duc d’Orléans’s garden near Paris. Despite this, Schneevoogt thought the tulip must originally have been Flemish rather than Parisian because growers in the two centres had different tastes in tulips. To his eyes, this was a tulip made in the Flemish mould, so he got in touch with two of his contacts in Flanders and asked them to look out for a ‘Louis XVI’ for his own collection. Again the innkeeper Delezelles was the source of supply. Schneevoogt’s Flemish friends bought one bulb for him (paying 600 francs) and another for their own stock. From this one ‘Louis XVI’, they raised enough bulbs to supply all the other florists in Flanders. Just after Schneevogt had secured his own ‘Louis XVI’ tulip, the innkeeper Delezelles called on him, saying he had another ‘Louis XVI’ for sale. He had already offered it to the nurseryman van Nieuwkerk, who had turned it down, saying he hadn’t enough money to pay for it. Schneevoogt, though, knew that several florists in London were longing to get hold of this tulip, so he bought the bulb. Then, when van Nieuwkerk was forced to sell his entire stock, Schneevoogt bought his ‘Louis XVI’ too. He paid 150 guilders for it, rather less than the catalogue price, and then sold it on to the famous Walworth Nursery in south London, by then in the hands of Samuel Curtis. The tulip appeared in the nursery’s catalogue of 1800, priced at twenty guineas.

  The price was high, because the bulb was slow to make offsets and so remained rare, but for a long time ‘Louis XVI’ remained the best of the Bybloemens. Later, it was generally offered in three grades – fine, superfine and rectified. In the ‘rectified’ state, the markings of the flower were supposed to be stable, the pure white of the petals edged with a regular, delicate feathering of violet. Although tulip growers in France, Flanders and England all had their ideas about what made a good tulip, ‘Louis XVI’ was a favourite in all three countries. The flower was regular in shape, both stalk and petals had plenty of substance and the colours on the petals were clearly defined.

  Though by 1821, the pre-eminence of the Flemish tulips
was beginning to fade, ‘Louis XVI’, even fifty years after its introduction, was still admired by florists and nurserymen alike. The English nurseryman John Slater remembered seeing a small stock of ‘Louis XVI’ breeders in Voorhelm’s Dutch nursery, and in the garden of an amateur florist, who around 1838, had bought at auction a large part of the Voorhelm bulb collection. At that time it was considered the finest in Europe. Then, in 1842, Slater had seen a hundred blooms of ‘Louis XVI’, the greater part feathered ones, flowering in the unnamed amateur’s garden.18 Perhaps it was the huge success of ‘Louis XVI’ that persuaded florists of the time to grow more of these purple and white Bybloemens and less of the yellow and red Bizarres which until 1800 had been such favourites in Flanders. Florists ruled now, as the number of Flemish nurserymen dwindled; between 1830 and 1860, amateur florists in Flanders far outnumbered commercial growers such as Dehove at Tournai and Galliez at Lille.

  At about the same time that Dr Hardy was thundering in the Midland Florist over the rules governing the perfect English florist’s tulip, Monsieur Tripet was doing the same for the French florist’s tulip.19 Tripet was a florist and nurseryman in Paris and in 1843, had swept the board at the spring show of the Paris Horticultural Society, winning the gold medal offered for the first time by the Duchess of Orléans. His exhibit included 800 different kinds of tulip massed together in vases in an artificial bed a metre wide and seventeen metres long. That was only a fraction of the varieties growing in Tripet’s nursery, where more than 40,000 tulips bloomed in season. The collection was reputed to be worth a cool 100,000 francs.

  Tripet’s Paris triumph did not impress the tulip growers of Lille or Tournai whose worst flowers, they said, were better than anything that Tripet had produced for the Paris Horticultural Society. But the members of the Société d’Horticulture du Nord de la France were always tough on growers outside their own charmed circle. They were pretty tough even on those inside it. The Society’s annual report for 1837 criticised so many florists and their flowers that no one would agree to serve on the Society’s committee until the reports were dropped. No florist ever seemed to agree with another’s judgment, particularly on the show bench, and at this time, at least a hundred amateur tulip growers were keen members of the Society.

  The Flemish tulips were noted for their exceptionally strong stems and chunky, squarish flowers. Though few later varieties commanded the huge prices paid for ‘Louis XVI’, the florist Dehove at Tournai still sold a hundred tulips in 1837 for 8,000 francs. Bulbs of superior varieties such as ‘Duchesse de Berry’ fetched 150 francs each. When Dehove died, his entire stock was sold at auction, the plum of the sale being a cache of ‘Triomphe de Dumortier’, which had broken from the brilliant red breeder ‘Meteor’. Dehove’s heirs were hoping for 2,000 francs for the forty bulbs, but they were disappointed.

  ‘Breeders’ (that is, bulbs with clear-coloured flowers that might later break into feathered and flamed varieties) of a dazzling clear red were a speciality of Flemish growers of the 1830s and 1840s: Dezangre at Louvain raised the beautifully shaped ‘L’Astre Fulminant’, Dumortier at Tournai had raised ‘Meteor’. For brilliance and vigour, the flowers outstripped by far anything that Dutch breeders were producing at the time, but the Dutch were supremely good at growing, which made bulbs big business in Holland. By the nineteenth century, bulb fields had expanded to the areas round Overveen and Bloemendaal and by the middle of that century had spread as far as Hillegom, Lisse and Noordwijk. Travelling salesmen cast the bulb firms’ nets even wider. In 1849 Hendrik van der Schoot became the first travelling salesman (bollenreisiger) to cover the increasingly lucrative marketplace of the United States. There had been tulips in the US since about 1640 when the first Dutch settlers planted the gardens of their New Amsterdam homes, but the desultory trade between the two countries which had grown up in the eighteenth century, was now more thoroughly exploited by the Dutch.

  Until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, tulip growers in Flanders and England continued to develop their own flowers, oblivious of what was going on in The Netherlands, though in both countries, the pockets of growers were dwindling. Though English and Flemish growers had the edge on the Dutch as far as breeding was concerned, they were not such good salesmen. In Flanders, where the speciality was strong, long-stemmed seedlings of dazzling colours, a 300-year-long tradition of tulip-growing ended with the sale in 1885 of Jules Lenglart’s tulips. Lenglart had inherited a fine collection built up by his father-in-law, M Tripier, but he was also a celebrated tulip breeder himself, specialising in fiery red breeders, many of them seedlings from ‘Princesse Aldobrandini’.

  The Lenglart auction was fixed for 15 May 1885, the sale being made up of 200 different breeders and 800 different varieties of broken tulips, 10,000 bulbs in all. But no bidders were interested and eventually the entire stock was sold to the famous firm of E H Krelage, which had traded from the Kleine Houtweg, Haarlem since 1811. The fabulous striped, feathered and flamed flowers that had intrigued growers for centuries were cast aside. From the plain-coloured breeders, previously only valued for their ability to break into other colours, Krelage selected the best flowers (no yellows) and launched them in 1886, re-christened as Darwins. Patiently marketed, publicised, exhibited by Krelage’s company, they became a phenomenally successful race of tulips, brash flowers for a new, brash age. In England, the other independent centre of tulip-growing, the battle for dominance was longer drawn out.

  Chapter VI

  The English Florists’ Tulip

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, florists’ societies, devoted to the culture of a particular group of flowers (it included the auricula and the pink as well as the tulip), had been established all over England. Early newspaper advertisements for florists’ ‘feasts’ (see Chapter III) were replaced by news of shows, such as the tulip show held at the White Horse, Bury St Edmunds where ‘lovers of these amiable bulbs’ could win a silver punch ladle for the best bloom.1 But since it was usually pubs, such as the White Horse, the Golden Cock Inn, Kirkgate, Leeds, the Shears Inn, Lee Bridge, Halifax or the Crown Inn, Nottingham, which offered convenient meeting rooms for the tulip shows, carousing continued just the same. The arrangement suited both parties: the florists got a venue at a minimal sum and the landlord sold vast quantities of ale. Some severe florists in Newcastle pointed out that their show was ‘a Source of Delight and not of Extravagance and Luxury, which was the only Rock former societies of this sort split upon’.2 Fortunately, in the larger manufacturing towns, rival shows were common and Newcastle florists with a thirst would find themselves well catered for by Mr James Beech at the Rising Sun. Some publicans, such as Mr Cock of the Botanical Tavern, Ashton-under-Lyne honoured the florists’ societies in the names of their inns.

  In the hundred years between 1750 and 1850, scarcely any town of importance in the north of England was without its tulip show. Members of the Ancient Society of York Florists, founded in 1768, brought hyacinths, polyanthus and auriculas to their spring display, which ended with a feast. Tulips were shown separately in May. The Botanic Society of Manchester held its first tulip meeting on 20 May 1777 and the Rev. William Hanbury (1725–1778), rector of Church Langton, Leicestershire, wrote that ‘the florists are now become more numerous in England than has been known in any preceding age…many clubs have been founded and feasts established, when premiums are allowed the best and fairest. These feasts are now become general, and are regularly held at towns, at proper distance almost all over England. At these exhibitions, let not the Gardeners be dejected if a weaver runs away with the prize, as is often done’.3

  Florists’ societies flourished too in Ireland where the Dublin Florists’ Society had been founded in 1746 by officers in the Huguenot regiments that had fought for William III (Prince William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne. Many of these Huguenot soldiers, such as the Marquis of Ruvigny, were given grants of land and, as Ruvigny did at Portarlington, brought over French builders to pro
vide houses for Huguenot soldiers and their families.4 Tulips were a speciality among Flemish and Huguenot growers. The bulbs were valuable, but at the same time, eminently portable and ripples of tulip-growing everywhere followed Huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution in mainland Europe. Huguenots brought tulips to meetings of the Dublin Florists’ Society to be judged by fellow members; if a tulip passed their stringent scrutiny, it was given a name and toasted with drinks all round.

  In Scotland, Huguenots – weavers rather than soldiers – started florists’ meetings in Edinburgh, where refugees from France and Flanders had established themselves in Picardie Row in the suburbs of the city. Their apprentices soon spread the florists’ flowers farther afield to Dunfermline, Glasgow and Paisley, where a florists’ society was established by 1782. Huguenot traditions of growing and showing flowers merged with an older Scottish tradition of Gardeners’ Lodges, such as Adam’s Lodge in Aberdeen and Solomon’s Lodge in Banff. These lodges were in part friendly societies, to help members in times of need, but ‘mutual instruction’ was their real raison d’être. There were secret signs and passwords and all the paraphernalia of the kind that Gaergoedt had explained to Wearmondt in the Dutch Samenspraecken (see page 163). The lodges staged competitive shows of flowers and, once a year, a great feast. An Adam’s Lodge was set up in London on 4 June 1781, but in the main, the lodges were a Scottish tradition. By this time anyway, the London Floral Feasts were already well established, the brainwave of the Fulham nurseryman and auricula buff, Thomas Wrench (c1630–1728).