by Anna Pavord
The instructions handed out to tulip growers show the tremendous care, the attention to detail and the observant eye of the typical florist. Patience was important too. After the seven years of breeding, growers might wait ten or twenty years for a tulip to break and still have nothing to show for their labours. Although it was so central to the success or failure of the florists’ efforts, it was still a mystery to them that some tulips ‘broke’ while others did not. As late as 1848, the Midland Florist, in response to an anguished reader’s letter, was still quoting the plaster/dung hill recipe recommended more than a hundred years earlier by John Cowell in The Curious and Profitable Gardener. Cowell had also included water from jakes. In the acutely sensitive ambience of the mid nineteenth century, the Midland Florist thought it best to miss that bit out. Switching bulbs from place to place often brought about the desired effect. Other growers advised baking the dried-off bulbs under the hot sun in the summer. This was a thoughtful piece of reasoning, given the tulip’s natural habitat, but it was not the right one. Some thought that a poor, dry soil gave the best results. Others advocated lashings of muck. But whereas early eighteenth-century growers had invoked alchemy and spells to get their tulips to break, nineteenth-century tulip fanciers sought more rational explanations. Ironically, the answer came only when the tulip fancy itself was almost extinct.
The 1855 auction of all the tulips, some 30,000 bulbs, by Groom’s nursery, which had moved from Walworth to nearby Clapham Rise in the suburbs of London, marked the virtual extinction of trade growers in the south, following a falling-off of interest among amateurs. Only the previous year, Groom had still been advertising his new show tulips at ridiculous prices: 100 guineas for the tall feathered Rose tulip ‘Duchess of Cambridge’, 100 guineas for ‘Miss Eliza Seymour’. In the hands of James Maddock, who established it in the 1770s, the Walworth nursery had become a tulip lover’s nirvana. Its reputation continued unblemished under his son-in-law, Samuel Curtis, who had passed it on to Henry Groom in 1825. Now the tulip beds were emptied. The grand open days when Groom’s prize tulips were exhibited in a bed fifty yards (45m) long were a thing of the past. Only a few years previously, the Rev. Richard Creswell (1815–1882) had described one such open day, with Groom’s show bed standing proudly ‘in the centre of a vast marquee, covered over at the top with linen cloth, and clothed at the sides and ends with coarse canvas. Both top and side cloths can be rolled up, so that sun or shade to any part of the bed can be commanded. By this method also the air is freely admitted, and the inside of the marquee, or awning, is cool and refreshing, and most beneficial to the flowers. Mr Groom, who is a gentlemanly and polite florist, introduced me without ceremony within the vail, and I, in a moment, was ushered into the company of kings and queens, dukes, lords, ladies and commoners. The sight was most dazzling and magnificent: the sun was shining, and each lovely flower was beautifully expanded’.25 Groom’s tulips were bought at auction for a startlingly low price by the Manchester grower, John Slater, the northern florists’ revenge for the fortunes Groom had charged in the thirty years he had owned the nursery.
The first champions of the English Florists’ tulip, mostly nurserymen such as James Maddock himself, Thomas Davey of the King’s Road, London, Luke Pope of Handsworth, Birmingham, were already dead, Pope in 1825, Davey in 1833. Now many of the second phase of growers, the ‘aldermen’ florists, were fading away too. John Shelmerdine had gone. Charles Baron of Saffron Walden, a florist as well known for his hollyhocks as he was for his tulips, died in 1848, followed to his grave by the whole of the corporation, of which he was a prominent member. Mr Gibbons, whose race of tulips, the Chellaston seedlings, had caused such a sensation when they were first launched in the 1840s, had lapsed into obscurity, though John Spencer of Thulston, Derbyshire, who in 1847 had triumphed at Derby’s Open Tulip Show with ‘Magnum Bonum’, a fine yellow tulip marked with a rich reddish-brown, was still going strong.
The founding fathers had been southerners, but it was northern growers, such as William Lea of Bedford Leigh, Lancashire, who raised the Rose tulip ‘Industry’, the hand-loom silk weaver David Jackson of Middleton, Lancashire and the fine group of growers based around Wakefield in Yorkshire who were now chiefly responsible for saving the superb, refined English Florists’ tulips from extinction. The Wakefield growers included an extraordinary number of shoemakers, such as the brothers Tom and George Gill and William Mellor of Nettle Lane. In the same lane, bloomed the tens of thousands of English Florists’ tulips cultivated by Tom Spurr, a treat for the crowds who made an annual pilgrimage there on the Sunday prior to the Wakefield show. Tommy Parker, another Wakefield grower, ‘who would stay out half the night if he could chat with anyone interested in tulips’, lives on in a street in Wakefield still called Parker’s Fold. Sheffield was another safe haven for the breed. Here, Ben Simonite (1834–1909), a cutler like many of his fellow Sheffield florists, found time to breed pigeons, rabbits and greyhounds as well as tulips.
Up in Scotland the Paisley florists continued the long tradition of growing tulips that had been established in the area by the Huguenot weavers who originally settled there. On 9 July 1853, members of the Paisley society gathered to hear a letter from Mathew Perry, a former member of the society who had emigrated to America. Perry was hoping to buy a hundred tulip roots, ranunculus and other seeds to continue the florists’ traditions in the new country. A committee of three, John Waterston, John Robertson and William McAlpine, was appointed to compose an answer. ‘Out of respect to Mr Perry, he being lately a member of this club’, the committee decided to send him free of charge a hundred tulip roots of different sorts and the other seeds mentioned in his letter. All that is, except the ranunculus. Flowering had been sparse and there was scarcely any seed to be had.
Despite these pockets of dedicated growers, found especially in Derbyshire, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire, the tulip was in decline as a florists’ flower. It was not an easy thing to bring in a perfect state to the show bench and, increasingly, those florists for whom the arrival rather than the journey mattered, turned their attention to less-demanding subjects such as leeks and chrysanthemums. The tribalism that had fuelled so many enjoyable spats among the tulip growers could now be displayed, though in a more passive way, by identifying with a football team. Association Football’s first cup final was played out in 1871 and, from the 1870s onwards, most towns of note had their own clubs. The rapidly changing face of towns and cities contributed to the decline too, the effect felt by all florists, not just the tulip growers. The 1851 census had revealed that, for the first time in British history, more people lived in urban areas than in the country. An economic boom fuelled the growth of industrial centres such as Manchester, Nottingham and Derby, but increasingly, people worked in factories rather than at home, as the florist-weavers with their handlooms had done. The cost of the industrial boom was the loss of many of the small plots where generations of florists had grown their flowers; the passing of the Smallholdings and Allotments Act of 1906 came too late to save them. ‘Many of our busy towns,’ wrote the late-nineteenth-century florist, Rev. Francis Horner, ‘which in the boyhood of men now middle-aged had outskirt gardens, the familiar haunts of old florists, have spread their unlovely over-growths of brick and mortar far beyond. It used to be a clear mile outside the town where in the earliest years of my florist life I grew Auriculas and Tulips; now, however, a raw and dreary street of monotonous tenements, and with an unmeaning name overlies the old green spot.’26 In a dismal mood, Horner called in on the new occupants of Number 4, which he calculated had been built exactly over his tulip beds of twenty years ago. He was met with blank and uncomprehending stares.
A huge body of knowledge disappeared with the deaths of tulip growers such as George Lightbody of Falkirk (in 1872) and Richard Headley of Cambridge (in 1876). Their lives had spanned the whole of the century in which the English Florists’ tulip had been the cynosure of beauty and the pinnacle of the florist’s craft. For connoi
sseurs of tulips, the annual invitation to visit Headley’s home, Stapleford House, during the flower’s blooming in May was one that was never turned down. The month after his death, The Garden magazine advertised the sale (on 23 May 1876) of Headley’s bulbs, which included many of his own breeding: the Bybloemen ‘John Linton’ and the crimson and white feathered ‘Sarah Headley’, which he had named after his wife. George Glenny, the horticultural journalist who crossed swords so spectacularly with Dr Hardy in the Battle of the Tulip, had died at Norwood in Middlesex in 1874 and was followed only a year later by his opponent. Dr George Wilmot Hardy, scourge of tulip judges, fount of thunderous prose, staunch member of the Liberal Party and Alderman of the Borough of Warrington, was buried in Warrington Cemetery after a service at St Paul’s Church. The shutters of the shops were closed and the blinds of the houses drawn down as his funeral cortège passed by. His name lives on in the tulip raised by Tom Storer of Derby and ‘broken’ as a long-unsurpassed red Bizarre by Thomas Haynes in 1862. ‘Dr Hardy’ still wins prizes at the annual shows of the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society.27
In earlier times, the death of one eminent tulip grower would have been subsumed by the advent of another, equally skilled. Now, only Samuel Barlow Esq of the Stakehill Bleach Works, Castleton rose to fill the gap left by the death of these four men, whose names, for an entire generation of growers, had been synonymous with the tulip. Barlow (1825–1893), who in 1871 had bought the bulk of Hardy’s tulip collection, was a hero in the Arnold Bennett mould: a self-made man, an energetic county magistrate, Mayor of Middleton, a council member of the Manchester Botanical and Horticultural Society, President of the Manchester Arts Club, director of the Winterbottom Book Cloth Company Ltd – and sometime president of the National (now Royal National) Tulip Society. While contributing in no small measure to the problems of ‘a district where the atmosphere is so fully charged with elements injurious to vegetable life that the surrounding country is almost denuded of trees’, Barlow was a passionate horticulturist. The dichotomy seemed a positive virtue to one correspondent who wrote roundly that ‘Mr Ruskin, and some of his followers, who waste time and energy by preaching up a perfectly Utopian crusade against “devil-driven machinery” as the enemy of natural beauty and truth, should go to Stakehill to learn how the two apparently hostile interests can, by patience, perseverance, and skill, be made to live peaceably together’.28 Sixty factory chimneys, similar to Stakehill’s own, could be counted from the Stakehill grounds.
A Lancashire man, Barlow was born in Medlock Vale, the son of ‘one of that band of earnest and enthusiastic working-men botanists who have done so much to create a love of beauty and sweetness in the too frequently unlovely life of the Lancashire manufacturing districts’. Barlow followed his father, first into the bleach works of Messrs Otto Hulme and Sons at Medlock Vale and then later at Stakehill. From an early age he grew lupins and poppies, fancy primroses and auriculas; tulips were a latter passion, but he was already showing them by 1848. When his father died, Barlow, aged thirty, was made manager of the Stakehill bleach works. Just six years later, he became the owner. In its day, Stakehill was regarded as a perfect example of the way in which ‘high culture and exquisite taste can be associated in the closest manner with the requirements of manufacturing industry’. Paintings by artists of the Manchester School covered the walls of Barlow’s house. He was also one of the first people in this country to buy paintings by the French Impressionists, such as Camille Pissaro. Display cabinets overflowed with ‘ceramic curiosities’. Outside, waggon loads of soil were brought by railway from a plot Sam Barlow owned at Great Orme’s Head, Llandudno, to replace the poisoned earth of the neighbourhood. There were vineries, orchid houses, stove plants, choice begonias, pelargoniums, rhododendrons, lilies. And English Florists’ tulips, of which Barlow built up the biggest collection that anyone had ever owned.
Barlow, who was very much an ‘alderman’ florist, spared no expense on his hobby, and artisan florists such as David Jackson, the silk weaver of Middleton, benefited. Barlow had set his heart on acquiring ‘Mrs Jackson’, bred by Jackson around 1865. It was a strikingly fine Bybloemen with petals of good substance, heavily feathered with glossy black on a white ground. Its base (always an important criterion) was as white as snow. He wanted, of course, the whole stock of the variety, so that nobody else could say they had it, and offered Jackson, twenty years his senior, the weight of the bulbs in gold. He ended up paying even more, but as the Scottish florist James Douglas said at the time, ‘they are weak in the head about Manchester’.
On his four show tulip beds, each containing 140 rows of seven flowers, he grew the shy flowering ‘Bessie’, a Bybloemen feathered with dark purple on a white ground, raised by the Halifax grower John Hepworth. He grew the feathered Bizarre ‘George Hayward’, marked with dark crimson maroon on a pure golden ground. First ‘broken’ in 1853, this was a famous tulip, which featured prominently in the Florist magazine the following year. Though it could be astounding, it was an uncertain flower, the feathers sometimes running wildly out of control. It had been raised by Lawrence of Hampton, a southern grower belonging to the previous generation of florists. Barlow also grew the perfect ‘Annie McGregor’, flamed with rosy-scarlet on a pure white ground, which had been bred by the Lancashire weaver John Martin. Its arrival marked one of those great leaps forward in breeding that occasionally occurred in the English Florist’s tulip and, for decades, ‘Annie McGregor’ remained unsurpassed.
Mindful of his position as president of the Royal National Tulip Society, Barlow turned his attention to the show bench too. The English Florists’ tulip had to a great extent been nurtured in the public houses of the north, and by tradition, tulips were staged at shows in nothing fancier than beer bottles of dark brown glass. Barlow designed a flower bottle, five and a half inches high, three inches in diameter, to be made in black glass, which he hoped might give ‘a tone of order and regularity’ to shows, especially those staged by the Royal National Tulip Society. But on 28 May 1893, Samuel Barlow, the man who ‘created a floral paradise amid a forest of chimney shafts’ died, after falling down the stairs of his Manchester warehouse. Fittingly, he too is commemorated by a tulip, raised, like ‘Dr Hardy’, by the railwayman and florist, Tom Storer, who grew his tulips along the embankments of Derby’s railways. Indeed, in the Bizarre tulip ‘Sam Barlow’ the two great tulip growers were united, for Storer had bred it by crossing ‘Dr Hardy’ with another superb Bizarre ‘Sir Joseph Paxton’. The skill of generations of florists, the heartbreaking devotion of the tulip lovers who, for hundreds of years, had kept the blood of the English Florists’ tulip running pure in the veins of their flowers, shone out in the flames of Sam Barlow’s gold and scarlet flower. But that blood was now very thin.
Chapter VII
The Last Hundred Years
By the end of the nineteenth century, the tulip, in its long and charismatic history, had already reinvented itself many times. It had been a rare novelty, a botanist’s marvel. It had been a jewel flower, a snob flower grown by all the richest and most fashionable gardeners of Europe. When they got tired of it, it became a hobby flower, adored and brilliantly cultivated by groups of florists in France, Flanders, England and Scotland. They brought the flower to the peak of perfection before they too mostly abandoned it. The void was quickly occupied by the clever Dutch, who recreated the tulip as a flower for bedding out en masse and developed a highly lucrative trade in tulips as cut flowers. The process had been anticipated in the United States, where florists such as the late eighteenth-century clockmaker and silversmith William Faris had cultivated exquisite feathered and flamed tulips in his Chesapeake garden. Gradually men of his kind disappeared along with their flowers and mass displays became the norm. Six hundred different sorts of tulip were bedded out in the Linnaean Botanic Garden, Long Island in the spring of 1845, while in Britain and France, tulips were still the specialised darlings of the florist gardeners. E H Krelage created one o
f the first bedding-out displays seen in Paris, when in 1889 he filled the ground round the Trocadero Palace with massed plantings of his new Darwin tulips, carefully placed to catch the eye of visitors to the Great Exhibition of the Work of Industry of All Nations (the Eiffel Tower was a more lasting memento of the occasion). At Kew, as a gardening correspondent of the time noted, tulips crammed the beds in front of the Palm House. ‘It is the species and hybrids that now give colour to the elaborate arrangement, and we are pleased to see that such types, practically unknown a few years ago, are thus massed together in a conspicuous position in the Royal Gardens.’1 ‘Couleur Cardinal’ with its rich dusky plum-red flowers filled the beds either side of the Broad Walk.2 By 1896, Baylor Hartland, who raised many fine tulips at his Ard Cairn nursery, near Cork, was offering ‘Tulips for Extensive Park Planting. Special Quotations to Superintendents’ and tulips began to appear en masse in London’s royal parks. The old Double Early ‘Tournesol’, red with a yellow margin, was bedded out at Grosvenor Gate, together with the white ‘Joost van den Vondel’, the tulips undercarpeted with auriculas, Primula sieboldii and yellow doronicum. Regent’s Park glowed with beds of the brilliant red Double Early tulip ‘Grand Maître’. Subtler combinations prevailed in Gunnersbury Park where the beautiful old Parrot tulip ‘Markgraaf’ with brown flowers veined and speckled with yellow was interplanted with another brown and red Parrot tulip, ‘Café Brun’.3 The same thing was happening in the public parks and botanic gardens of the great manufacturing centres of the north. In 1912, 30,000 tulips were bedded out at Sheffield Botanic Garden. The purity of the Single Early tulip ‘White Hawk’ was particularly noted, though this may have had more to do with the coal strike and the consequent reduction in smoke and dust than with the inherent qualities of the flower itself. On a former building site in Bradford, a miniature bulb field sprang up, ‘a source of considerable speculation among tramway passengers and pedestrians passing along Morley St and Easby Rd’.4 Fred Terry, a Bradford auctioneer, was the man behind the venture. Impressed by what he had seen in the bulb fields of The Netherlands, he took up an agency for the Dutch firm of Wagenaar and planted 10,000 tulips of seventy different varieties on the Bradford building site, the whole ‘field’ insured for £100. By the 1920s, 200 different kinds of tulips were being grown in the London parks alone, the bulbs all supplied by British growers and the cost jointly borne by the Empire Marketing Board (who wanted to promote home-grown goods) and the Office of Works.5