The Tulip
Page 23
There is another trap for breeders too. Most tulips are diploids with two sets of twelve chromosomes (2n=2x=24). Darwin Hybrids are triploid and there are just a few tetraploid tulips (2n=4x=48). The species tulips T. clusiana, T. orphanidea and T. sylvestris are all tetraploid. So is the strong, tall Single Late tulip ‘Mrs John T Scheepers’ with robust yellow flowers and the carmine and white Triumph tulip ‘Judith Leyster’. Breeders like tetrapoloids because they are markedly more robust than diploids. But the catch is that they are all late-flowering and consequently of no use in the cut-flower business. Breeders tried crossing tetraploid tulips with diploid ones, to increase the range of triploids, but there was a catch here too. Most of the seedlings from these crosses turned out to be sterile, so could not be used in further breeding.23
In principle, the huge range of wild species should provide tulip breeders with a palette of characteristics unequalled in the flower world. Imagine the breeder, standing like a perfumier, surrounded by ranks of the tulip’s wild cousins. What would he reach for to introduce into his perfect tulip? It would depend for whom he was creating this paragon. Growers for the cut-flower market prize early flowering above almost anything else, so here T. pulchella, which often produces its rounded purple flowers by the end of February, would seem to be a crucial ingredient. But T. pulchella has refused to cooperate in shotgun marriages arranged by tulip breeders and will not cross-breed with any garden tulip that has been introduced as a possible partner. Then imagine the breeder reaching for T. turkestanica, which has anything up to seven flowers on a stem. How useful it would be (again for those in the cut-flower business) to be able to offer customers a wider range of multi-flowered tulips. But once more, the tulip spurns the pimp. T. turkestanica, along with other tulips of the Eriostemenes group (T. tarda, T. bakeri, T. dasystemon, T. saxatiles), will not cross with garden tulips. Commercial growers would be interested too in finding strains of tulip that were immune to the virus that causes the flowers to break into feathers and flames. (Gardeners on the other hand would kill to get hold of some of those old, broken cultivars.) Here, the species were prepared to help. Absolute resistance to the tulip-breaking virus (TBV) is found in T. fosteriana and this resistance has been passed on to several T. fosteriana cultivars such as ‘Cantata’ and the T. fosteriana clone ‘Princeps’. ‘Cantata’ has T. fosteriana’s fine foliage too. Not many tulips are noted for their leaves, but T. fosteriana has bright green foliage, as glossy as an arum’s. The famous grower Dirk Lefeber of Lisse (1894–1979) pinpointed a typical irony facing the tulip breeder: when he had raised a seedling of the utmost perfection in terms of form, colour, markings and petal shape, a paragon fit to inspire even the fussiest lalezari of the Turkish court, it would always turn out to be a poor, weak grower. Lefeber also pointed out how extraordinarily random the business of breeding was: identical crossings of the same two tulips, carried out within a few hours of each other, could result in two entirely different batches of seedlings. But occasionally, breeders hit on a combination that produced such extraordinary results, everybody else was spurred on with new hope. From a single cross between T. fosteriana ‘Madame Lefeber’ and a Darwin tulip, Lefeber raised 364 seedlings, including the famous tulips ‘Apeldoorn’ and ‘Gudoschnik’, all of which were better than existing cultivars. For a tulipman, this was nirvana.
Breeders recognise that tulips can be coaxed, but not bullied. They understand that, hidden in even the most docile-looking flower, an anarchic streak persists. You see it in the little dashes of green that break through the clear red petals of the Triumph tulip ‘Hollandia’. You see it in the sinuous mad curl of a petal of ‘Mary Belle’, a Triumph tulip introduced only two years ago, but evidently still wondering whether it should shock its creators by turning itself into a Parrot instead. You see it in the dagger points of the egg-yolk-yellow tulip ‘Yokohama’, as needle-sharp as the tulips that seventeenth-century Iznik potters painted on their tiles. You see it in the little sparks of red fire lighting up the double flowers of ‘Monte Carlo’, which had always supposed that it was yellow. You see it in the surprising sky-blue base of the lustrous dark tulip ‘Black Swan’, another thoroughbred from the Rijnveld stable. That clear blue bottom was pursued through hundreds of years of breeding by the patient tulip lovers of Flanders, who endowed the flower with so many of its best characteristics.
What is there left to do? I put the question to Geert Hageman of Triflor as we wandered out into the bulb fields surrounding this experimental breeding station at Oude Niedorp in The Netherlands. The land stretched away flat to the horizon, blocked into rectangles of colour like a vast painting by Mondrian. Long black lines of ditches separated the blocks, draining water away to the sea penned up miles away behind the country’s coastal barricades. Mr Hageman walked slowly between his rows of flowers, explaining the virtues of one tulip, the problems of another. Only one in a thousand of his tulip seedlings is likely to have a serious future and it would take twenty years to bring that one seedling successfully into the market. Fashion was too ephemeral a creature to follow, he explained. By the time he had created some new cultivar to cater to the present passion for dark-saturated tulips such as ‘Queen of the Night’ or ‘Black Parrot’, the stylemongers would have moved on to some new fad. He had to keep his gaze fixed on less transitory goals: re-establishing the tulip’s natural elegance of form, its resistance to disease, exploiting its extraordinary capacity for diversity. And which of these thousands and thousands of seedlings so patiently bred, so rigorously assessed, did he dream of at night, I wondered? He walked over to a tiny block of flowers, almost invisible among the vast spreads of red and yellow around us. He bent down, picked a tulip and held it up in front of me. It was a dark striped Bybloemen, not the seventeenth-century ‘Viceroy’ that had caused so much havoc during the Dutch tulipomania, but a twentieth-century mirror image. Feathers and flames of the deepest purple crept over petals which were the colour and texture of the finest damask; the tulip’s base was as pure as snow; in the centre, the stamens held themselves with the dark poise of butterflies’ antennae. I had seen the future and it was ravishing.
Acknowledgements
Anyone writing about the tulip must acknowledge a great debt to Sir Daniel Hall, whose works The Book of the Tulip (1927) and The Genus Tulipa (1942) remain essential reading. Ruth Duthie’s pioneering book Florists’ Flowers and Societies (1988) is another crucial text for anyone interested in the English Florists’ tulip.
Many people have given generous help while I have been working on my own book, but most outstanding is the debt I owe to the librarian and staff at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library in London. Over the past six years, Dr Brent Elliott, Jennifer Vine, Helen Ward and Elizabeth Gilbert have provided more support and encouragement than any researcher dares hope for.
I would also like to thank Professor Turhan Baytop of Istanbul University for help with tulip sites in eastern Turkey and for permission to quote from his book, Istanbul Lalesi; Deborah Cutler, who provided much valuable research material by way of prints and drawings; Alan Davey for information on the bulb-growing industry of the Fens; Werner Dukamp of Transtech for translations from Dutch and German documents; the Royal Dutch Bulbgrowers’ Association (KAVB) for statistics relating to the tulip industry; Fergus Garrett for invaluable help as guide and interpreter in eastern Turkey; Dr Oliver Impey of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford for information on tulips in art; Anne Kindersley for historical references on the tulip in the Ottoman Empire; Geert Hageman of Triflor for information about tulip-breeding; Christopher Lloyd for teaching me how to look at plants; Brian Mathew, editor of The Bulb Newsletter, for detailed help on the ever-shifting taxonomy of tulips and for sharing information on sites of wild species; Karen Richards for transcribing original documents; Dr David Scrase, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge for allowing me to study works not normally on show; Dr Paul Taylor for his helpful comments on Dutch flower-painting of t
he seventeenth century; William Tear for lending material relating to his career as a tulip-grower; and the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society for making available papers relating to the society’s early history.
Quotations for documents in the archive at Hatfield House, Hatfield, Hertfordshire are included by kind permission of the Marquess of Salisbury. Quotations from the Thynne Papers are included by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire.
Liz Calder has been an inspired and generous editor. My grateful thanks are due to her and to the rest of those at Bloomsbury who have worked so hard on the book. Meg Calvert tracked down the pictures.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce images: Bayerische Staatgemaldesammlungen, Munich, p. 9; Christie’s Images, pp. 5, 22; Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, pp. 3, 12, 19; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, p. 8; Peter Goodchild, p. 13; Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, p. 18; Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, p. 16; Lindley Library (Royal Horticultural Society), pp. i, 7, 23; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, p. 20; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, p. 10; Royal Doulton Ltd, p. 23 and cover; Sotheby’s, p. 17; Teylers Museum, Haarlem, p. 21; Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection), p. 11.
Chronology of Tulips
1451
Tulip cultivated in the garden of Sultan Mehmed II (1451–1481)
1520
Under reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566) tulip becomes an integral part of Ottoman culture
1545
First botanic gardens in Europe established at Pisa and Padua
1546
The French explorer, Pierre Belon, begins his journey to Turkey and the Levant
1553
Les Observations de Plusieurs Singularités, by Pierre Belon, is published in Paris
1554
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Ferdinand I’s ambassador to the Sultan’s court, begins his journey to Turkey
1559
Conrad Gesner sees the first tulip to be described in Europe, growing in the garden of the Great Councillor Herwart at Augsburg
1561
Woodcut of tulip appears in Annotationes in Pedacii by Valerius Cordus
1561
Matthiolus brings out Historia Plantarum with another illustration of a tulip
1562
Tulips arrive in Antwerp from Constantinople
1565
The Codex by Leonhart Fuchs shows a tulip with eight petals
1565
Commentarii in Sex Libros Pedacii Dioscoridis by Pier Andrea Mattioli shows a tulip under the label of a narcissus
1568
First printed illustration of a tulip in Holland appears in Florum et Coronarium by Rembert Dodoens, the woodcut made by Pieter van der Borcht
1571
Forty-one kinds of tulip are described in herbal written by Matthias de l’Obel (Lobelius) of Lille
1572
Clusius meets Busbecq in Vienna and gets tulip seed and bulbs from him
1576
Rariorum aliquot Stirpium… by Carolus Clusius appears, with an important appendix that includes tulips
1576
Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia by Matthias de l’Obel
1577
Tulips are grown by James Garrett, apothecary, in his garden at London Wall. In his Herball (1597), Gerard says Garrett had been growing them ‘these twenty years’
1581
Clusius records a double tulip ‘a bad green’
1581
Publication of Plantarum seu Stirpium Icones, a collection of 2,173 woodcuts, mostly Plantin’s, gathered together by Gobelius, physician to the Duke of Prussia
1590
Tulips noted growing in Leiden
1593
Clusius comes to Leiden as Professor of Botany and lays out a new botanic garden
1597
Publication of John Gerard’s Herball
1598
Tulips noted growing at Montpellier
1600–
1650
Tulip highly fashionable flower in European gardens
1600
Nurseries established by Dutch growers, along the Wagenweg and the Kleine Houtweg, south of Haarlem.
1601
Clusius describes different tulips including ‘Cafe Lale’ and ‘Kavala Lale’ in Rariorum plantarum Historia
1602
The Dutch East India Company is set up
1603
T. gesneriana (T. suaveolens?) is imported from the Crimea
1606
A Florilegium with tulips is published by Pierre Vallet in Paris
1610
Tulips appear as a motif on Dutch tiles
1611
Tulips flower in the Provençal garden of M Peiresc
1611
Tulips appear on a bill presented by the gardener John Tradescant to his employer, the Earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield
1612
Emmanuel Sweert publishes the first trade catalogue, the Florilegium
1613
Publication of the Hortus Eystettensis, showing highly developed tulips among the flowers growing in the garden of the Prince-Bishop of Eichstatt, Germany
1614
Fine engravings of tulips in the Hortus Floridus by Crispyn de Passe the Younger
1617
Traité compendieux et abrégée des Tulippes published in Paris
1618
John Tradescant’s visit to Archangel, where he is told there are both ‘tulipes and narsisus’ – presumably wild species
1620
Parrot tulips are noted
1621
A botanic garden is established by the university at Oxford
1623
Wassenaer votes ‘Semper Augustus’ the tulip of the year and notes it sold for a thousand florins a bulb
1624
The first colonies are established in the New Netherlands by the Dutch West India Company
1629
John Parkinson’s Paradisus mentions 140 varieties of tulip
1630
Sir Peter Syche sends ‘Tulippe Caffa’ to John Tradescant
1630
Publication of the list of tulips grown by Sultan Murad IV (1623–1640)
1631
The first Florists’ Feast is held in Norwich
1634
The beginning of tulipomania
1636
The height of tulipomania which ended in 1637. Bulb traders earn the equivalent of £30,000 a month
1636
The inventory of the Margrave of Baden-Durlach’s garden lists 4,796 different kinds of tulip
1636
T. clusiana known in England
1637
Publication of Adriaen Roman’s satiric dialogues
1637
The Alkmaar tulip auction of 5 February
1640
Cornelius Johnson’s painting of the Capel family
1651
The Austrian Ambassador, Schmid von Schwarzenhorn, brings forty tulips from Europe to Istanbul as a gift for the Emperor Mehmed IV
1651
The Paris nurseryman Pierre Morin publishes his first catalogue, which includes a vast array of tulips
1659
Sir Thomas Hanmer, tulip fanatic, completes his Garden Book
1660
Thomas Fuller’s Speech of Flowers sneers at the ‘Toolip, which hath engrated the love and affections of most people unto it’
1665
John Rea catalogues 184 tulips in Flora; seu de Florum Cultura
1670
The French grower Lombard sells the stock of seedlings which later become important ‘breeders’ for Flemish growers
1676
Three hundred tulips are named in 2nd edition of John Rea’s Flora; seu de Florum Cultura
1678
Publication of Remarques Nécessaires pour la Culture des Fleurs by
Pierre Morin
1680
‘Keizerskroon’ introduced – still available today
1684
Nurseryman Roger Looker of St Martins in the Fields, London, supplies the 1st Viscount Weymouth at Longleat with ‘100 best mixt tulips’ for £5
1688
George Ricket’s catalogue
1689
George Ricket’s bill for tulips is sent to Levens Hall, Westmorland
1698
Tulips grow in John Tateham’s Pennsylvania garden