The Tulip
Page 18
The florists’ tulip shows followed a rigid pattern. First, a date had to be set that suited all the members of the local society. On 12 May 1803 Robert Carswell, D Smith and Thomas Robertson of Paisley were appointed surveyors ‘to inspect the gardens of all those members which design to compete with Tulips…to determine the day appointed for the genus at competition but if they cannot with certainty give their decision upon next Thursday night they shall be allowed some more time to do it’. The surveyors must have come to a speedy decision because the following week, they fixed the show day for Friday 3 June, ‘to make it agreeable to all parties both for late and early flowers’.11 Seasons varied so wildly, dates for florists’ competitions were never set far in advance.
Once the day was decided, shows were advertised in the local newspapers, the ground rules varying little from area to area. An Ipswich journal of 15 May 1776 sets the scene for a hundred similar events: ‘The Tulip Shew will be at John Rycraft’s in St Clement’s Parish on Monday the 21st instant; when each Person who produces the two best Flowers (of his own Property three months) shall be intitled to two Pieces of Plate; and the third to five shillings: but no person will be admitted to shew any Flower there unless he is a Member of the Society. The Flowers to be at John Rycraft’s by Twelve o’clock; Dinner at One; where the Company of Florists will be esteemed a Favour. Signed by Peter Burroughs, President and William Tayler and John Thorndike, Stewards.’
In Norwich, where the first florists’ feasts had been held in 1631, the florists’ tradition must have subsequently died out, perhaps when the original refugee Huguenots left East Anglia to set up their looms in Lancashire, but it blossomed again in the nineteenth century as part of a widespread cult of florists’ flowers. The Society of Florists at Norwich was revived in 1828 ‘by the exertions of an artisan named Dover, who brought with him from the North and West of England, many choice roots. It consists of something over thirty members…men of very humble condition who devote their short minutes of leisure to such a pursuit’.12 The ‘artisan’ was most probably George Dover (fl. 1820s–1850s), who had a nursery at Magdalen Street, Norwich. The society would have been good for business, as other nurserymen/florists like Thomas Davey had discovered. Davey had turned down an offer of £157. 10s. for his one bulb of ‘La Joie de Davey’. The nurseryman Robert Holmes of 3 Mount Street, Westminster Road, Lambeth also raised and showed some fine seedling tulips, including ‘Louis XVIII’ which he later sold to John Goldham of Pentonville for £42. The prices that nurserymen charged for their best tulips outraged the Paddington Green florist, Thomas Hogg. ‘A moderate collection of choice Tulips, of those beautiful, those exquisitely beautiful flowers, which are the pride and boast of every amateur who grows them, could not be purchased for a sum much less than one thousand pounds, at the usual catalogue prices, nor obtained and got together till after years of patient search and unwearied labour.
The high prices that have for many years been affixed to tulips in the printed catalogues of our Florists are so deterring and repulsive of the fancy, that persons with a taste and fondness for this flower are afraid to indulge and enter into it. Those prices are generally rated nearly one-half higher than they may be bought at… This has a bad effect, and wears the appearance of imposition, and beyond doubt prevents a more extensive culture of them.’13
The Account of Flower Shews held in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire etc, published in Manchester every year during the 1820s, shows how quickly the fancy grew, gathering acolytes in all the major industrial centres of the north. Sixteen different tulip shows were listed in 1820, twenty-seven by 1826. In the potteries, workers translated their love of the flower onto the china they were painting. From the early nineteenth century onwards, tulips decorated many of the flower pots and stands, porcelain painted in enamel colours and gilt, made for instance by the Derby china factory.14 Derby’s star flower painter was William Pegg (1775–1851) whose father had been a gardener at Etwall Hall, near Derby, a hotbed of societies devoted to the English florists’ tulip. By the age of ten, Pegg was already working in the potteries and after three years, became apprentice to a china painter, working fifteen hours a day in the factory. In 1796 he was offered a five-year contract at the Derby China Works, which was booming after taking over the illustrious Chelsea Pottery. But Pegg, who had heard John Wesley preach in Staffordshire in 1786, began to worry about the morality of decorating expensive porcelain with sinfully beautiful flowers for the tables of rich clients. In 1800 he became a Quaker and abandoned his paint box to start a new and spectacularly unsuccessful life as a stocking maker. Stockings may have satisfied the inner man but did little to sustain the outer one. Starving, Pegg was forced to return in 1813 to his former work at the Derby China Works, filling pages of a sketchbook with elegant florists’ tulips which later found their way onto Derby’s porcelain. After seven years, plagued once more by religious scruples, he left the Derby factory for good and died destitute in 1851.15
No such scruples haunted the publishers of periodicals; tulips starred in the magazines that, from the early nineteenth century onwards, catered to an increasingly discriminating audience. Samuel Curtis’s magnificent Botanical Magazine, published from 1787 onwards, had a wider, more lofty purpose than to promote florists’ flowers, but it featured its first plate of a florist’s tulip in 1808, relatively early in its history. Florists’ flowers though appeared exclusively in another Curtis publication, the Beauties of Flora which appeared from 1806–1820.16 This never became as famous as Thornton’s production, the Temple of Flora, although the plates were even bigger. Curtis’s illustration of tulips was done by Thomas Baxter (1782–1821), one of the chief china painters at the Worcester and Swansea factories. Before the Beauties of Flora finished its run, Conrad Loddiges started to publish his Botanical Cabinet (1817–1833) which was followed six years later by the Chelsea nurseryman Robert Sweet’s more parochial British Flower Garden (1823–1837). Gardeners were buried under a landslide of magazines: Benjamin Maund’s Botanic Garden, launched in 1825, the Gardeners’ Magazine (1826), founded and edited by the great polymath, John Claudius Loudon, another publication by Robert Sweet, the Florist’s Guide, launched in 1827. During its five-year run, the Guide published more pictures of tulips than any other flower, sixty-one coloured plates with notes on the men who had raised them. It always was men. Women, prominent in the field of florists’ pinks, seemed to have little to do with tulips. The Miss Dalton who, at the Lancaster Tulip Show on 22 May 1826, won first and second prizes with a black ‘Baguet’ and the popular feathered red and white tulip called ‘Dolittle’, was a rarity. Tulips even wandered into novels of the period; writing of Morgiana, one of his heroines, Thackeray said she was ‘a tulip among women, and the tulip fanciers all came flocking round her’.17
For London florists, the competitive show was not the sole raison-d’être of the tulip year, as it was for growers in the north. Southern florists also paid ceremonial visits to celebrated tulip collections. Henry Groom (fl. 1820s–1850s), who had taken over after Curtis at the Maddocks’ nursery at Walworth, hosted a number of such occasions, where ‘connoisseurs assemble, compare, criticise, exchange and purchase, and afterwards dine together’.18 Vast quantities of food and drink seemed an intrinsic part of tulip-growing. Groom had a tulip bed 130 feet long by 4 feet wide (45m × 1.2m), presenting, said a contemporary, ‘a magnificent spectacle’. Mr Lawrence’s tulip bed at Hampton, ‘said to be one of the most select in the neighbourhood of London’, was another regular place of pilgrimage. Lawrence had been the florist responsible for ‘breaking’ the elegant Bybloemen ‘Lawrence’s La Joie’, a pure white variety, neatly edged with dark velvety purple. Mr Burnard, the Gardening Magazine’s correspondent, said he had found at Mr Lawrence’s ‘a number of connoisseurs, amateurs and men of leisure, among the last, the Duke of Clarence’ inspecting and admiring the tulips, which included the yellow and black ‘Polyphemus’, the rarest and most valuable tulip in the bed.
The
Groom and Lawrence tulip beds were perhaps the most famous of the time, but there were plenty of others round London in the 1820s: Mr Strong’s at Brook Green, Mr Weltje’s at Hammersmith, Mr Austin’s at Upper Clapton, Mr Cheese’s on Millbank. Islington was a hotbed of tulip fanciers. There was John Goldham who had bought the bulb of ‘Louis XVIII’ so expensively, Samuel Brookes who in 1819 had gone into partnership with Thomas Barr at the Northampton Nursery, Ball’s Pond, Islington and Mr Franklin, a seedsman and florist of Cottage Place, City Road, Holloway. Rotherhithe, Bethnal Green and Lower Tooting also had their eminent tulip growers, and at Camberwell, Mr Bowler created a sensation with his red and yellow Bizarre tulip ‘Everard’. Windsor had a clutch of tulip growers; so did Slough, where Charles Brown, nurseryman, was an aficionado. This was another marked difference between south and north. In the 1820s, many of the southern florists were also professional nurserymen, a fact which did nothing to endear them to the amateurs of the north.
The London florists had shows as well, the principal ones being held at Islington, Dulwich, Hammersmith and Chelsea. Thomas Hogg explained the rules of the Islington and Chelsea societies, where the subscription was one and a half guineas a year. Tulips were judged during the ‘ordinary’, generally served at 1pm, the flowers passed hand to hand between members seated at the dining table. After the meal and the judging, the flowers would go on general view. Hogg said there were other societies too, but the two he spoke of were ‘not only the most numerous in point of numbers, but likewise the most respectable in regard to the members composing them’.19 Some societies evidently still had a problem with their image.
From 1830 to 1850 the tulip fancy was at its zenith in Britain, prompting George Glenny to establish in 1832 the Metropolitan Society of Florists and Amateurs. The splenetic Glenny (1793–1874) trained in his youth as a watchmaker, but later became editor of the Gardener’s Gazette and proprietor of the Dungannon Nursery, Fulham. As an editor Glenny was considered ‘exacting and quarrelsome’ but he had a great influence on the way the tulip developed in the early 1840s because of his set of ‘properties’, or rules, to which a good tulip should conform. Clearly understood standards made florists’ flowers easier to judge in competition, so Glenny’s ‘properties’ were eagerly seized on by florists of the time. It was a source of endless irritation to him that he was not always credited as the instigator of this great leap forward. Other florists, he wrote, carefully concealed the fact ‘that their practice was built upon my foundation’.20 This ‘sense of neglect and injury had made him altogether uncontrollable’ in the opinion of the Gardener and Practical Florist magazine, but others praised him as an original and powerful force among florists, a man with a keen eye for a good flower. Glenny paid the huge sum of £140 for the entire stock (seven bulbs) of the ‘Everard’ tulip raised by Bowler of Camberwell.
But as the tulip bulb began to seem, once again, a valuable commodity, the problems that had afflicted Dutch growers in the early seventeenth century began to trouble British florists. In 1831 the Hull Advertiser reported a savage attack on ‘Mr Marmaduke Carnaby’s fine and valuable collection of auriculas and tulips’ which took place in the Beverley Hills neighbourhood of Hull. John Slater of Albion Place, Lower Broughton, near Manchester complained that ‘at a meeting where were exhibited some of the choicest blooms from the first beds in Lancashire, I won three firsts and two thirds; and a “Roi de Siam”, which was unquestionably the finest flower I staged, was stolen, during dinner, before it was judged’.21
By the time Slater published his Descriptive Catalogue of Tulips in 1843, northern growers were beginning to eclipse those in the south. It was still possible in London, reported the Gardeners’ Chronicle ‘to see small beds of tulips in the back gardens of the houses abutting on the Walworth and Camberwell Roads with their protective canvas covering in May’, but not as many as you could now see in Wakefield or Altrincham, Derby or Halifax. It rankled with northern growers that the southerners priced good new tulips so high. Slater, a Manchester man, noted that the catalogues of London growers contained bulbs at what they called moderate prices of £50 or £100 a bulb but grumbled at giving £3 to a country florist for a broken flower. The highest price known to have been offered in the north had been for ‘Lady Crewe’, a feathered pink and white tulip raised by Sherwood of Derby in the 1820s and that was only £5. London growers, said Slater, would do well ‘to treat their country brethren with a little more liberality; if so, I do not doubt but Lancashire would soon excel London and its neighbourhood in Tulips, as it does in other florists’ flowers’.22
But while George Glenny could still wield a pen, the southerners were not going to cede victory. Uncompromisingly, Glenny continued to trumpet the southern-raised tulip ‘Polyphemus’ as the best Bizarre in the land. Are the London, or the Lancaster florists the best judges of tulips asked a contributor to the Floricultural Magazine on 14 October 1841? He took the precaution of using a pseudonym – Jock Florum of Tulip Lodge, but Glenny had no such scruples. As far as he was concerned, northern growers were barbarians. How could they be anything else, when they set feather and flame before form? Glenny published his essay on the Properties of the Tulip in The Gardener and Practical Florist of 1843. Rule number one (of twelve) stated that the cup of a tulip ‘should form when quite expanded from half to a third of a hollow ball’. Though he did not know it, Glenny had just fired the first shot in the Great Tulip War of the 1840s, the hostilities between north and south being brought to an uneasy truce with the formation of the National Tulip Society in 1849.
Glenny considered himself more than a match for Henry Groom, nurseryman and florist of Walworth (for whom perfection lay in the ‘semi-oblate spheroid’), and of John Slater, author of A Descriptive Catalogue of Tulips (who championed ‘one half and the sixteenth part’ of a sphere. It mattered). But he had not reckoned with Dr W G Hardy (1801–1875). Hardy, born in Salford and schooled in Chesterfield and Stockport, had then been articled to a surgeon in Manchester. Obstetrics was his profession; the flute, the double bass and above all, the tulip, his passion. The dull slaty purple-coloured ‘Talisman’ was one of his tulips. When it ‘broke’, it produced a beautiful Bybloemen, the white ground elegantly marked with purplish-black. In 1847 Hardy published a seminal essay ‘On Perfection of Form in the Tulip’ in a new magazine, the Midland Florist, which was aimed particularly at growers in the Midlands and the north of the country. With a deadly pen, Hardy set out to demolish the arguments put forward by those who did not agree with him that the best, the only, form for a true florist’s tulip was the half sphere.
Hardy took the semi-oblate spheroid form that Henry Groom had championed in the Florist’s Journal of 1840 to mean a tulip that measured one-fifteenth part less than the simple half sphere. The unfortunate Groom had also dictated that ‘the pole should be a little depressed’ and that there should be ‘a little swell outwards towards the lower part of the petal, which will give the flower a good shoulder’. Mercilessly, Hardy annihilated the thesis, invoking the image of a rainbow. If a rainbow had a dip in the middle and a bulge either side, would we regard this as an improvement, he asks? ‘Such is the deformity Mr Groom would have us to regard as perfection in a tulip’.
Mr Slater, with his one half and the sixteenth part fared no better. The larger the petals, the greater the propensity for them to fold inwards, obscuring the centre, Hardy pointed out If they reflexed outwards, this would be equally abhorrent to a lover of pure form in the tulip. But, he added magnaminously (Slater, after all, was a Manchester man), the quantity added by Mr Slater would be small enough not to matter had he not added other conditions with which no florist could possibly comply. ‘The cup of the flower’, Slater had written, ‘should be composed of six thick fleshy petals, which should run out from the centre at first a little horizontally, and then turn upwards, forming almost a perfect cup with a round bottom, rather wider at the top.’ How could a cup be round in the bottom, and at the same time horizontal thundered Hardy
, banishing Slater’s theories, like Groom’s, to outer darkness.
Glenny came off worst. He favoured one third of a hollow ball as the ideal shape to aim for, because ‘all fanciers know that the beauty of a tulip depends on the entire inside surface… They know too that unless the entire inside surface can be seen at once, it must be seen under a disadvantage.’ It was obvious to Glenny that the florist’s tulip must be able to open up enough to show off its beauties, and that if the cup was larger than a third of a sphere, it would not be able to do this effectively. No, proclaimed Hardy. Mr Glenny’s objection to the half-circle on account of its being too deep to reveal the internal complexities of the flower was ‘altogether groundless’. Many of the best florists’ tulips had markings of such complexity, the size of their petals was an important consideration. The half sphere produced a larger canvas for the painting of the feathers and flames. Hardy estimated that a tulip three and a half inches in diameter would, if conformed on the half-sphere principle, have petals nearly half an inch longer than one shaped as a one-third sphere. The advantages of the half sphere were so overwhelming, Hardy continued, that he had ‘no hesitation in adopting it as the standard by which the form of every tulip ought to be tested’. Mr Gradgrind, Charles Dickens’s Lancastrian manufacturer, would have approved. Bitser, Gradgrind’s star pupil in Hard Times, could scarcely have done a better job in reducing the tulip, the sublime, reckless, irrepressible, wayward, unpredictable, strange, subtle, generous, elegant English Florists’ tulip to a geometrical equation.