by Anna Pavord
Gertrude Jekyll, the ultimate arbiter of taste in the Edwardian garden, had rather more subtle ways of using tulips than the keepers of Regent’s Park. Everything depended on combining tulips of the right colours, she told readers of The Garden, which she edited from 1899 onwards. She used the blackish-purple tulip ‘Faust’ with ‘Grande Monarque’ which was lighter and redder. She paired the low-toned yellow of ‘Bronze King’ with ‘Louis XIV’ a much deeper bronze, heavily shaded with purple. She did not shy away from bright colours, but they were carefully chosen to complement each other. Her flame-coloured ‘Orange King’ tulips were interplanted with ‘Panorama’ which was in the same spectrum, but just a shade redder.6 The Rev. Joseph Jacob, who contributed to the same magazine, noted that in 1911, the year of George V’s coronation, visitors to his own garden in Whitwell, Flintshire, showed a marked preference for the red tulips among the 500 or so varieties that he grew. Jacob, a whimsical writer, wondered ‘if it is the great event that suggests it, and so we unconsciously adopt it’. But several writers pointed out a practical problem associated with massing tulips in beds: they got in the way of the summer bedding – zonal pelargoniums, fuchsias, annuals – generally set out at the end of May. The tulips could not be allowed to die down naturally before they had to be chivvied out of the way. Sometimes they were dug up and thrown away as soon as they had finished flowering, a practice which suited the bulbmen of The Netherlands very well.
Not everyone was a convert to the new style. There was a xenophobic element that took against the new beefy bedding Darwins for no better reason than that they were foreign. Some finely tuned gardeners felt they were ‘crude in the extreme like “Rule Britannia with Variations” to a musically educated man’. Others were even blunter: ‘It is impossible to deny that the blending of foreign blood has seriously impaired the value of the true strains. Many of the continental sorts lack cleanliness and when they crop up amongst their purer sisters their appearance at once betrays them’.7 Though, even in Edwardian times, tourists visited the Haarlem bulb fields to marvel at the tulips, some Englishmen felt that in their own gardens they ‘did not want the bang in the eye which they give us’. Underplanting helped soften the effect and low-growing forget-me-nots, double arabis, limnanthes, silene, alyssum, aubrieta, primroses, polyanthus and London pride were often recommended as companions, to give tulips a more natural setting in the garden.8
Parallel with the craze for bedding out was a strong movement towards so-called wild gardening; the plants were no less primped and pruned but the general effect was supposed to mirror the effects of nature. The style was vociferously championed by the Irish gardener, William Robinson, whose book The Wild Garden had been published in 1870. At the fine garden he made at Gravetye, near East Grinstead, Sussex, Robinson put his principles into practice and his message was heard even across the Atlantic. ‘Beautiful and permanent effects may be obtained by planting hardy bulbs in groups and masses on the lawn, in shady nooks, where they find a congenial and permanent home, flowering abundantly in their season, and requiring little or no care after being planted,’ promised an American catalogue of the early twentieth century. ‘This mode of planting is termed “naturalizing”, and is now generally followed in Europe’, it went on, recommending crocus and colchicums, as well as tulips, for the purpose. The tulip had come full circle. After all its reincarnations, here it was again as a wild flower, just as it had started out. But who knows how many millions of bulbs withered away in the New World before gardeners discovered that tulips are oddly fussy about where they will ‘naturalise’? Nature had tethered them to the latitude of 40 degrees north. They needed some persuading that the virgin territory of 40 degrees south was as good. No tulips had existed in the New World before man took them there.
In the Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardener of 1895, more was written about tomatoes than about tulips; the fruit had only lately been introduced from the New World and was a great curiosity. But how the tulip had fallen! When on 25 May 1894, members of the Butley Tulip Society met at the Orange Tree Inn for their sixty-ninth annual show, how many of them could have predicted that within a few years, the society would be defunct? A silver cup was presented by Mrs Samuel Barlow, in memory of her late husband, and was won by Charles Needham of Hale, Cheshire. Only seven names were to be inscribed on that cup, for the society’s 1901 show was the last ever held in a public house in the traditional way. The Rev. Francis Horner, a dinosaur among the dwindling band of florists, lamented the fact that the tulip collections of forty men were now amassed under one roof. The flowers staggered on – just – but those who knew how to grow them were dying and few replaced them. Only in Wakefield did they keep the faith. Tommy Parker, who had raised feathered tulips of a marvellous constancy in his plot under the town’s gasworks, had gone, but the Mellors and Gills, the Calverts and Hardwicks were still represented, some of them third-generation tulip growers. William Mellor carried off the premier prizes for both flamed and feathered flowers at the Wakefield Society’s 1893 show, held at the Brunswick Hotel, Borough Market. But thirty years on, even the Wakefield Society was tottering. ‘Help us to keep the names of Sharpley, Mellor, Moorhouse, Schofield, Hepworth, Gill, Hardwick and many other tulip raisers of old to the fore,’ begged the secretary in the society’s 1928 Annual Report. ‘Let us continue to keep the Wakefield and district evergreen to our noble flower – the English Florists’ Tulip.’
The Royal National Tulip Society fared no better. Founded, with high hopes, in 1849, it never quite achieved its objectives: to unite the tulip growers of north and south and to overcome the northern florists’ suspicion of those tulip fanciers whose only crime was the misfortune of having been born south of Watford. The 1890 show took place at the Botanical Gardens, Manchester, and the winners were nearly all northern growers – Wood of Manchester, Kitchen of Stockport, Knowles of Stalybridge. In 1894 the RNTS show was at York and afterwards, members of the Ancient Society of York Florists entertained their tulip brothers to lunch at the White Swan Hotel, Goodramgate. But that year, the shakily spliced society splintered into two sections, a Northern and a Southern. The fine gardener Ellen Willmott (1858–1934), who used shoals of tulips in her gardens at Warley Place, Essex and on the French Riviera, was a celebrated member of the society’s Southern Section, which in 1895 held its own show at The Temple, London. The prizes went to Manchester, just the same. The northern growers had their own show three weeks later, at the Free Library, Middleton. Charles Needham and Samuel Barlow’s nephew, James Bentley (1859–1924), both prizewinners at the show, led the celebrations afterwards at the Boar’s Head. George Glenny’s combative ghost was invoked against the judges officiating at the RNTS’s 1896 show, held again at the Free Library. ‘They will pardon us,’ said a southern commentator icily, ‘if we remind them that purity is the great essential quality in the Tulip…’9 In the end, the northerners prevailed, as anyone might have guessed. In 1936 Sir Daniel Hall, the south-based president of the Royal National Tulip Society wrote to the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society, the sole remaining society devoted to tulips in the country, saying that with Needham’s death, the National was left with only two members, himself and the nurseryman, Peter Barr. He suggested that the balance of the National society’s funds should be used to create a Needham Cup class at the annual Wakefield Show and sent, as well, all the silver trophies that had formerly been awarded at RNTS shows. The Wakefield Society’s Minute Book solemnly records the gifts: ‘one large cup, one small cup and one piece of plate. These were greatly admired by the Committee.’
The success had by the Dutch nurseryman E H Krelage in launching his new Darwins was jealously noted by professional English growers. As the tradition of tulip-growing gradually died out in Flanders, Krelage had bought one of the last great florist’s collections and, selecting out the best varieties (at that stage all pinks and purples – no yellows) rechristened them with the permission of Charles Darwin’s son, Francis. Krelage, a consumma
te marketer, lost no opportunity to promote his new brand. Meanwhile, Peter Barr (c1862–1944), the Covent Garden nurseryman, made a similar move. Barr’s father, another Peter (1826–1909), had been born near Govan in Lanarkshire, but came south, first to a nursery in Worcester and then to establish a famous business at Covent Garden, London. With his bushy wild beard and his black beret, he looked more like a painter of the Impressionist school than a bulb grower but he was a well-known authority on daffodils and tulips. The Barr offensive was spirited and he was loyally supported in the press, who showed a distinct partiality in their treatment of the subject. ‘During the last few days a large and interesting collection of English Florists’ tulips has been in bloom in the Long Ditton Nurseries of Messrs Barr & Son. Several beds have been planted with them and it is safe to say that in no nursery in the British Isles has a more complete representation of this splendid type of tulip been seen together.’10 By buying up collections such as Lloyd’s of Petersfield, Peter Barr amassed more than 20,000 English Florists’ tulips at his nursery, concentrating, like Krelage, on the plain-coloured ‘breeders’ rather than the feathered and flamed varieties. It was a moot point whether he was responding to demand or trying to create it.
Barr’s purpose was to release the English florists’ tulip from its exhibition straightjacket, as Krelage had done with the Flemish Baguet tulips. ‘The Tulip of whatever class is essentially a garden flower and the florist’s type is as precious as the gaudy Dutch kinds…’ continued the faithful correspondent of The Garden. The ‘gaudy’ betrayed a deep prejudice against the Dutch flowers but, in truth, the English florists’ tulip did not have a strong enough constitution to jostle its way through the mixed planting of an English herbaceous border. It was an aristocrat. It hated bad weather. It was used to being cosseted, covered, protected from harm. And slugs adored it.
Krelage, to his great credit, did not rise to the bait. Tenaciously, he took every opportunity to refute the English claim that their tulips were the only ones worth growing. When The Garden published a glowing account of the Parrot tulips to be seen in James Walker’s Ham Nurseries, Krelage sent the magazine’s editor some fine Dutch Parrot tulips, along with some examples of his best Darwins. The editor then was the splenetic William Robinson, of Gravetye, and he was not to be so easily bought. ‘We confess,’ he replied magisterially, ‘to a greater partiality to the breeder forms of our English tulips amongst which are some great beauties, especially among the roses and bybloemens, with great moon-like, pure white centres and the most exquisite forms and often brilliant and delicately soft colours.’11 But Krelage was right. The Darwin tulips were better adapted to the new vogue for mass bedding than the English Florists’ tulip. The Darwins had long, strong stems that pushed the flowers high, so that they could be enjoyed from the outside rather than the inside. This was essential for a flower that was used in the mass rather than as an individual. The beauty of the English Florists’ tulips lay in the quality of the inner flower – the combined charms of the pure base, the anthers, the stamens and the feathered or flamed markings, which always showed more strongly on the inner surface of the petal than the outer.
Like Krelage, Peter Barr picked up many old tulips at the bulb auctions that, by tradition, followed the death of a florist of the old school. But he had a nose like a bloodhound for a good flower and gathered together old varieties from gardens all over Britain and Ireland. Gardens in the south and east of Ireland had long been happy hunting grounds for lovers of old-fashioned tulips, some of them descendants of the bulbs that early Huguenots had brought with them after the Battle of the Boyne. The fine old Lily-flowered tulip ‘Mrs Moon’, yellow and sweetly scented, first bobbed up in a bed of the Single Early tulip ‘Ophir d’Or’, planted in her Irish garden by a Mrs Butler. She sold surplus bulbs of ‘Mrs Moon’ at a few shillings a hundred, so must have been mortified to find, only a few years later, Irish nurserymen offering it at the vastly inflated price of two shillings and sixpence or three shillings a bulb. Tulips grew well in Ireland, as the nurserymen Hogg and Robertson discovered when they established their bulb farm on fifteen acres of flat and sandy plain at Rush outside Dublin. (They also had land at Boston, Lincolnshire and at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.) But the most unlikely locales could provide treasures. Fred Burbridge (1847–1905), Curator of the Trinity College garden in Dublin, described a visit he made with Peter Barr to the Isle of Wight, where, in a small garden under the shadow of Carisbrooke Castle they found masses of old May tulips. ‘Selfs, striped, flaked, splashed, and the sturdy old self purples shot with chocolate and some pure browns with yellow edges which I have heard called “Treacle Tulips” by village dames, and all were good to see. So Barr and I leaned over the low palings and admired until their owner came out in a frilled sun bonnet and invited us to take a closer view. She fetched a spade and said she would give us “some roots” but we explained that we were on a journey and could not well take them with us.’12
Other nurserymen joined Barr in the battle against Dutch domination. Robert Wallace (1867–1955) grew 50,000 tulips on his fields at Colchester, Essex. Sutton’s staged 200 vases of tulips (2,000 blooms in all) at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Westminster show on 30 April 1912. The tulips, all grown on the nursery’s Reading bulb fields, won a silver-gilt Flora medal for the firm. Other bulb growers also brought tulips to the RHS shows: Robert Wallace of Colchester, George Massey & Sons, Hogg & Robertson (‘Holland in Ireland’ was their slogan), Alex Dickson, now better known for his roses than his tulips, R H Bath, James Box, nurseryman and cattle dealer of Haywards Heath, Sussex. Occasionally a rogue correspondent broke ranks and defiantly trumpeted the superior qualities of the Dutch article. The cerise-coloured ‘Pride of Haarlem’ bred by E H Krelage in 1894, was the best tulip to be seen in the whole of Barr’s collection said the Journal of Horticulture.13 Barr, though, continued the hard sell of his May-flowering tulips, retrieved from old cottage gardens where they had been blooming undisturbed for more than fifty years. But heart could not entirely rule head, and although Barr remained true to the English Florists’ tulip (Wallace and Barr continued to offer them until the firm closed down in the 1950s), he had to accept that there was a demand for the sturdy, weatherproof Darwins and other Dutch tulips. If he did not supply them, they would. In 1907, Barr introduced the fine purple and white Parrot tulip ‘Sensation’ which had arisen in The Netherlands as a sport of ‘Reine d’Espagne’. The name was apt, for this was the first purple and white Parrot tulip that anyone had ever seen. Although the type had been known since the mid seventeenth century, until ‘Sensation’ arrived, all Parrot tulips had been red and yellow Bizarres.
Infiltration of foreign markets by Dutch growers and nurserymen was not a new phenomenon. They had been exporting bulbs since the middle of the seventeenth century, with Voorhelm’s business in the Kleine Houtweg, Haarlem well known to gardeners all over Europe. But at the beginning, the market was very different. Customers were well-to-do, princes and aristocrats, who bought a huge number of different kinds of tulips, but in tiny quantities at vast prices. As trade became more democratic, sales depots were established, fuelled by Dutch imports. Instead of selling to individual customers, Dutch tulip growers sent bulk consignments of bulbs to nurserymen in foreign countries, who sold the bulbs on at a profit. The golden age for Dutch growers started around 1860 as they began to establish a stranglehold on the tulip trade. There was a huge boom in tulip-breeding, fuelled by an increasing demand for the flowers, especially in the United States. But the demand could not have been met without extra land to grow bulbs and that meant radically improving drainage in parts of The Netherlands that had not previously been used for tulips. Cultivation, historically centred in the sandy silts round Haarlem, spread out into other areas, round Lisse and Limmen.
Nobody denied the commitment of the Dutch bulb growers. They were hard-working; they were not bedevilled by the us-and-them attitude that permeated so much of British industry. Dutch nursery owners work
ed as hard as anyone they employed. Dutch bulb growers also took the trouble to visit the countries which imported their bulbs so that they could better understand the markets they were supplying. Dutch bulb lists were routinely translated into English, German and French with prices listed in foreign currencies. ‘How many English firms, even of the first rank, issue a simple foreign catalogue or even a short list?’ asked The Horticultural Advertiser.14
The United States was an important market for the Dutch, and by the mid nineteenth century, American nurserymen were already looking for reliable suppliers abroad. Henry Dreer of Philadelphia put his trust in the Haarlem firm of E H Krelage, established in 1811: ‘Having frequently noticed your name attached to catalogues of bulbs, sold in this country at auctions, and upon trial generally found them superior to others sold here, I am induced to address you with the view of importing directly from you yearly an invoice of bulbs suited to my sale. I am in this city in the seed and plant business, and wish to import every season from a house that I may always depend on receiving them in time and true to name and description.’15 He pinpointed two crucial problems of the bulb trade, one of which still bedevils it. While cargoes of bulbs still crossed the Atlantic under sail, delivery dates were necessarily uncertain. There was no excuse for sending out bulbs wrongly named, but this same problem plagues customers even today.