by Anna Pavord
The importance of the American market to Dutch growers was not lost on the Hillegom nurseryman van der Schoot, who in 1849 sent the first bollenreiziger or travelling bulb salesman to the States. He travelled from New York to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Boston, Albany and Buffalo. ‘He has been to all the gardeners and gentlemen having fine gardens, and offered to sell very cheap. He has obtained a great many orders’, reported Henry Dreer to Krelage.16 Van der Schoot had tried to tempt Dreer away from Krelage by offering lower prices, but Dreer remained faithful. The fact that Krelage was generous in extending terms of payment may have had something to do with his loyalty. Van der Schoot flooded the market, which had a disastrous effect on prices. Another American nurseryman, John Milton Earle of Worcester, Massachusetts, said that huge quantities of bulbs, mostly van der Schoot’s, had been sold at auction at Boston, for ridiculously low prices.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the United States was importing a million dollars’ worth of bulbs a year from The Netherlands and Dutch growers were able to bring pressure on the US government to reduce import duty on the bulbs. The quid pro quo was that The Netherlands would continue to import American flour.17 Some subversives muttered that there was no reason that US nurserymen should not grow their own tulip bulbs, but few truthfully thought that they could be produced as efficiently and economically there as they were in The Netherlands. And Holland was an important market for American corn, which was exported to few other European countries apart from Britain.
Tulips were always the most popular bulbs imported into the country, selling at least three times better than hyacinths or daffodils. In 1920, the US imported 54 million tulips, in 1925 106 million, in 1930 153 million. In the early days (1800–1850), just three firms, including Roozen and Sons at Hillegom and de Graff at Lisse, exported tulips to the States. At least seven firms joined the trade between 1850 and 1880, and in the boom years between 1880 and 1914, twenty-two Dutch nurserymen, including van Zanten at Hillegom and Grullemans at Lisse, sent tulips to American nurserymen and growers. Such fragmentation was characteristic of the Dutch bulb industry as most nurseries had only small holdings of land. Rijnveld and Son (raisers of the fabulous raspberry-ripple Parrot tulip ‘Estelle Rijnveld’) were unusual in having forty-five hectares planted with bulbs at Hillegom. Most nurseries were run on a much smaller scale. J Mooy had just one and a half hectares at Haarlem, the Roozens had thirteen hectares at Hillegom, Gerritt Segers only nine hectares at Lisse. But the bigger growers, such as Nelis and Sons at Heemstede, could support a number of export markets. They sent bulbs not just to the United States and Canada, but to Britain, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Africa, South America, even to Australia and New Zealand. It was an impressive achievement.
As The Horticultural Advertiser had pointed out, the Dutch deserved their success. They took trouble with their catalogues.18 They lost no opportunity to put their flowers in front of the public, donating millions of bulbs for mass plantings in the public parks of the Bronx in New York, at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in the St Louis Botanic Garden. In Europe, the Dutch made sure their tulips were to the fore in the Tuileries gardens in Paris, in the Tiergarten at Berlin, at Sanssouci in Potsdam, in the public parks of Stuttgart and Budapest, Copenhagen and Warsaw. If there was an international exhibition anywhere in the world with flowers as the theme, they were there, helpful, dependable, generous with their gifts. In 1927 they were at the Paris extravaganza organised by the Société Nationale d’Horticulture de France. The following year they were in Gent. In 1932 they made a big splash at the show organised by New York’s Horticultural Club. The next year they made an equally memorable impact at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Twenty thousand Dutch tulips of forty different kinds were displayed at the National Flower Show organised by the Society of American Florists at Houston, Texas between 17 and 19 February 1939. There was a cost of course, absorbed by the Centraal Bloembollencomite, which levied a charge on all Dutch bulb growers. In 1925, it cost them more than 3,000 florins to plant up the Bronx park in New York. In 1930, they sent tulips worth nearly 8,000 florins for the Tuileries gardens in Paris. But in marketing terms, the money was well spent.
Dutch entrepreneurs also organised trips to the bulb fields, which were fast becoming a tourist attraction. Whistlestop tours of the if-this-is-Thursday-it-must-be-Amsterdam kind are not a late-twentieth-century invention. More than a hundred years ago, a visitor reported that tulip tours were ‘well planned, well carried out, affording the greatest amount of pleasure and interest, with the least amount of confusion and fatigue within five hours – museums, luncheon, speech of welcome by burgomaster, drive through the wood and bulb fields and back to table d’h’te Amsterdam’.19 There were other ways of capturing potential customers too: gifts to American garden clubs, to Women’s Institutes in Britain, to schoolchildren in Sweden, to horticultural societies in Bucharest. Nobody could match the Dutch in their tireless search for new markets to absorb the vast numbers of bulbs they produced.
In England and the United States the taste for late-flowering tulips gradually overtook interest in the early-flowering ones, so that by 1937, the US was importing 88 million late-flowering tulips, but only 21 million early ones. In Germany and Scandinavia, the market was reversed, with twice as many early-flowering tulips being sold as late ones. For a long time, the most popular early varieties had been old favourites such as the orange-scarlet scented tulip ‘Prince of Austria’, raised about 1860, and the fabulous scarlet-plum ‘Couleur Cardinal’, raised in 1845. The orange scented Single Early ‘Fred Moore’, raised about 1908, was another popular variety. But just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when the export of Dutch bulbs to Great Britain topped the billion mark, early-flowering tulips were being supplanted by newer cultivars of late-flowering tulips. By the post-war period, the transformation was complete. The cherry-red Darwin hybrid ‘Apeldoorn’, the purplish-violet ‘Attila’, the elegant Lily-flowered ‘Aladdin’, pink and white ‘Blenda’, brownish-red ‘Cassini’ and the elegant Triumph tulip ‘Don Quichotte’ dominated the markets. All were raised in the 1940s or early 1950s. At the end of the twentieth century, Lily-flowered tulips such as the elegant ‘White Triumphator’ (raised in 1942) and ‘China Pink’ (raised in 1944) still remain firm favourites with British gardeners.
For growers primarily interested in the cut-flower market, early-flowering tulips remained important because the highest prices were fetched by flowers that could be coaxed into bloom months before they appeared in the garden. The sweet-smelling yellow Double Early tulip ‘Monte Carlo’ remains unsurpassed as a cut flower more than forty years after it was introduced. So does the rich pink ‘Christmas Marvel’, first grown in 1954. Ivory white ‘Inzell’ with its fine, pale foliage is a more recent addition to the list of best-selling cut flowers, as is the rich purple ‘Negrita’, with anthers of a strange greenish yellow shining out in the centre of flowers as lustrous as a doge’s cloak.
No tulips appeared in the price lists of cut flowers on sale at Covent Garden market during the 1880s, but they were being grown for sale in bunches by Walter Ware (c1855–1917) by 1893. Ware, the son of Thomas Ware of the Hale Farm Nurseries, Tottenham, was one of the most successful English growers of the age. From his nursery at Inglescombe near Bath, he introduced tulips such as the stunning ‘Inglescombe Yellow’, probably the nearest any British breeder ever got to matching the qualities of Krelage’s Darwins. His most popular cut flower though was the Lily-flowered tulip ‘Picotee’, white-bordered with a pale pink that darkened to rose at the very edges of the petals.20 Ware grew thousands of blooms for market, and the prices quoted for cut flowers in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century show that this must have been a lucrative trade. On 29 April 1911, tulips priced at sixteen shillings a dozen bu
ndles were the most expensive flowers sold at the Covent Garden market in London. Most tulips were cheaper than that, but even at an average price, only cattleya orchids cost more.21 But as the season progressed, prices dropped. By 20 May of that year, both Spanish iris and lily-of-the-valley were fetching better prices than tulips, though the best tulips could still command a shilling a bunch. Just before England’s General Strike of 1926, tulips were delivering even better returns to growers. Prices of eighteen to thirty shillings a dozen bunches were quoted for the twelve different kinds of tulip on sale that spring.22 Now more than a million tulips are sold every day during the season, but the more available they become, the less value they command. Dumped in buckets in petrol-station forecourts, tulips are now among the cheapest cut flowers you can buy.
The mass market that developed from the late nineteenth century onwards, tempted others besides the Dutch to invest in tulips. Bulb fields sprang up in the eastern counties of England, especially around Spalding in Lincolnshire. The drained, silty soils of the fens provided growing conditions that were at least as good as Haarlem’s and by the 1920s flower production was an important part of the local economy. At the outbreak of World War II, a veto was imposed on home sales and instead The Bulb Export Company sent four million tulip bulbs (including ‘Clara Butt’, ‘Bartigon’ and ‘William Pitt’) to the US in exchange for arms. As trading opportunities opened up at the end of the nineteenth century, the tulip was introduced into Japan too. Japanese gardeners, who found even the rose a deeply unrefined flower, were unlikely to develop a taste for tulips in their own exquisitely rarified gardens, but they recognised a commercial opportunity and a bulb-growing industry rapidly developed during the 1920s in the temperate areas of Japan’s west coast. Japan now produces more than 120 million bulbs every year, the flowers fitting into the cycle of the farmers’ rice harvests. Tulip fields flourish in the Skagit Valley, Washington State and among the Dandenong mountains of Australia. They are grown commercially in Tasmania and in the south island of New Zealand, where they were introduced around 1908. They are bred in southern Chile and on the high table lands of South Africa. You will find them still in Ireland and in Denmark, where growing conditions resemble quite closely those of The Netherlands.
But despite the way the tulip industry has spread over the temperate areas of the world, the Dutch still remain identified with the flower in a way that nobody else has ever quite managed – even the Turkish. The Netherlands exports at least two billion tulip bulbs a year, two thirds of their total production. Almost half of the country’s 34,000 sq km is covered in bulb fields and the area is increasing all the time with an export trade worth around £1,330 million. Breeders are constantly looking for new tulips that will bulk up quickly for the bulb trade, or that can be forced for the cut-flower industry. At the Dutch Centre for Plant Breeding and Reproduction Research (CPRO-DLO) scientists have found that very early on in a new seedling’s growth cycle, they can detect one or other characteristic. Bulbs of some cultivars swell at a much faster rate than others. Some bulbs, such as those of the yellow and red Kaufmanniana tulip ‘Stresa’ develop offsets at a greater rate than others, as the early florists had found to their despair. Some of the most prized antique tulips such as the dark purple and white ‘Louis XIV’ were heart-breakingly slow to reproduce themselves. This very unwillingness increased the flower’s value as far as the old florists were concerned, but in the new mass markets, breeders are impatient with such aristocratic delicacy. They want tulips that will bulk up as fast as rabbits. Usefully, breeders discovered that the tulips that produced most offsets, or ‘daughter’ bulbs, were also those that flowered most quickly from seed, giving growers a double advantage.
Forcing tulips for the cut-flower trade is now a more lucrative business than providing bulbs and half the bulb fields in The Netherlands are planted with the same twenty cultivars, all of which are used to provide forced, cut flowers. In fact half the cut-flower market in tulips is dominated by just ten cultivars, a hideous reductio ad absurdum for a flower that nature equipped with more than a thousand tricks. But breeders were quick to exploit early-flowering tendencies in seedlings when choosing new cultivars for the cut-flower market. The length of the tulip’s stem, the firmness of the leaves, the way the leaves sit on the stem, the proportion of leaf to flower were other important considerations. Of course, it is also important that a flower should last as long as possible in a vase and fortunately, breeders discovered (as you might expect) that the tulips that lasted longest outside in the bulb fields were also those that lasted longest in water. The rich cherry-red tulip ‘Debutante’ with plum-purple anthers is one of the seedling tulips selected for the cut-flower market by CPRO-DLO scientists. The primrose-yellow ‘Silver Dollar’ is another. Breeders have also tinkered with the rate at which tulips mature. Left to itself, a tulip will generally take seven years to develop from seed to flowering bulb (T. sprengeri is quicker), but scientists persuaded some cultivars to mature in four years. By experimenting with light levels and storage temperatures, they also managed to coax the tulip to flower three times in two years, reducing the growth cycle from a year to eight months. The commercial advantages, even given the extra handling costs, are obvious.
But surmounting everything else is the beauty of the flower itself. No matter how long and strong the stem, no matter how symmetrically spaced the leaves, no matter whether the tulip has been chivvied into doing its work in two thirds of the time that nature intended, in the end we buy tulips because they are beautiful. On a grey, sunless day, when a northeasterly wind is whipping the skin off the backs of your knuckles, nothing cheers the heart more than a bunch of tulips, weaving and bending in their vase like a flock of inquisitive birds. Even the scientists recognised this and set out to analyse exactly how colour works in tulips, how the various overlays which give the petals such extraordinary silkiness of texture arrive at a colour which we call pink, or purple or orange or yellow. In their hands, beauty is reduced to chemistry. A blaze of yellow tulips becomes so much carotenoid. Red flowers are just particles of cyanidin. Orange tulips are merely melanges of carotenoids and cyanidins. But red flowers usually include another pigment called pelargonidin, a different shade of red, which combines with bluish delphinidin to produce purple tulips. Pink tulips are the most complex of all in their mix of ingredients, though the pigments are laid on with a lighter hand. But the bizarre and magical character of the tulip prevailed even in the laboratory. Flowers that, to the scientist’s eye, seemed to be the same colour were found, when analysed, to be made up of completely different mixes of pigments. Conversely, flowers that in chemical terms at least, had the same pigments mixed in the same proportions looked completely different. Some seedling flowers were coloured with pigments that did not appear in the flowers of either of the parents. A yellow tulip containing only carotenoids when crossed with another yellow tulip with the same single pigment, may produce seedlings dominated by red cyanidins. Researchers concluded that the red colour must be a recessive trait in yellow hybrids, not always expressed, but lurking there, ready at unexpected moments to bob up and remind breeders of the tulip’s wild forebears.
Flower shape has proved as difficult to pin down as flower colour. Over the years, breeders have tried making crosses from Lily-flowered tulips, double tulips and tulips edged with contrasting colours to try and ‘fix’ certain characteristics in cultivars. But when they crossed the bright red Lily-flowered tulip ‘Dyanito’ with a tulip that was not Lily-flowered, they found that none of the resulting seedlings had ‘Dyanito’s’ characteristic waisted shape. Fortunately, crosses with the doubtful species T. acuminata, which has a long, thin, elegantly-waisted flower, produced many new and useful Lily-flowered seedlings – ‘Novired’ (bred 1990) and the sulphur-yellow ‘Talbion’ (bred in 1982). Seedlings bred from the Double Early red and yellow tulip ‘Abodement’ remained resolutely single, though the old Double Early ‘Murillo’ sports more easily than any other known tulip; since it was
introduced in 1860, 139 different sports have been registered. Crosses with ‘edged’ tulips were more satisfactory; at least half of the resulting seedlings were ‘edged’ too.
The sports that ‘Murillo’ produced were natural mutations, not the result of breeders’ crosses. The first Parrot tulips, the ‘Monstreuses’ noted by French and English growers of the seventeenth century, were also natural mutants. In 1975 a genetic Parrot was produced, the fuchsia-purple ‘Amethyst’, bred by ‘selfing’ the Single Late carmine and white tulip ‘Cordell Hull’. Now that the Parrot gene has been to some extent tamed, breeders have a better chance of producing other flowers with the Parrot’s characteristic, mad, fringed petals. The tulip’s natural ability to change its clothes, to produce flowers that are double rather than single, with petals that may be fringed or cut as well as smooth, flowers that are edged as well as plain, has been its chief fascination. Some cultivars, such as ‘Murillo’, have exceptionally slippery genes, but other tulips such as the red Single Late ‘Bartigon’, the lavender-coloured Single Late cultivar ‘William Copland’ and the cherry-red Darwin Hybrid ‘Apeldoorn’ are equally prone to sudden bright ideas about the way they should look. Scientists have found that to some extent, this tendency to mutate can be artificially stimulated by bombarding bulbs with X-rays. There are problems though. If the radiation treatment is given early (in August) many tulips emerge deformed the following spring. If the bulbs are irradiated late in the season (November), they seem normal in the first spring after planting, but may refuse to flower the following season. The score is still ‘Nature 2, Man 1’, though artificial radiation has produced the purplish-red mutants ‘Santina’ and ‘Yvonne’ from the deep-red Triumph tulip ‘Lustige Witwe’.