Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  DESPITE HAVING INDIGENOUS species of its own, Europe was slow to recognize the tulip and then mistook it for another flower altogether. First to break the news of this beautiful ‘red lily’ growing in all the gardens of Constantinople was the French naturalist Pierre Belon, who travelled through Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Arabia and the Levant in the late 1540s, later publishing a full account of the many ‘singularitez’ he had observed. These Turkish ‘lilies’ clearly puzzled him, for while their flowers resembled white lilies, their leaves and roots were quite different.

  Belon rightly remarked on the Turks’ unequalled love of flowers, even scentless ones, which they delightedly tucked into the folds of their turbans, preferring single flowers to the mixed posies favoured by his compatriots. The Turks were skilled gardeners, too, and their markets did an excellent trade in foreign trees and plants shipped into Constantinople; as long as the flowers were beautiful, buyers did not grudge the cost.

  These same foreign ships may have carried back to Europe the first Turkish tulips, for virtually all the early authorities credit Turkey and the extended Ottoman Empire as the source of the striking new tulips that arrived some ten years after Belon’s initial sighting – as seed from Constantinople, as early-flowering tulips from the Crimean port city of Caffa (Feodosiya) on the Black Sea, and as later-flowering tulips from Cavala (Kavala) on the coast of eastern Macedonia. England’s John Gerard spread the net a little wider, noting that tulips grew also in Thrace, Italy, Lebanese Tripoli and ‘Alepo in Syria, from whence I have received plants for my garden’. The Frenchman Charles de la Chesnée Monstereul mistakenly located the tulip’s birthplace in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), an error repeated by Alexandre Dumas in his nineteenth-century novel The Black Tulip, which named Sinhalese as the first language of ‘that masterpiece of creation called the tulip’.

  In fact the tulip’s homelands stretch from southern Europe into western and central Asia, centred principally around the Tien Shan and Pamir Alai mountain ranges of central Asia, and also in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black and the Caspian Seas. Some eighteen wild sorts of tulip grow in Anatolia – nearly a fifth of the world’s hundred species or so – and more were brought from central Asia with the Turkic migrations, giving Turkey a primary role in the flower’s onward transmission.

  AS THE TULIP’S fame arose first in Turkey and the lands of the Middle East, it seems appropriate to begin its story here, with the Ottoman Turks under Mehmet II who conquered Constantinople in 1453. Under the Ottomans, Turkey witnessed a great flowering of its garden culture. Tulips, unknown in Byzantine art, took their place among the four classic flowers – ‘quatre fleurs’ – of tulip, rose, hyacinth and carnation, appearing on many public buildings and fountains after this date, and in the celebrated Iznik ceramic ware produced from the end of the fifteenth century. While the Turks had loved the tulip long before the Ottomans conquered Byzantium, the Ottomans breathed a new naturalism into their art, allowing recognizable flowers to emerge from the stylized palmettes of earlier eras. Instead of looking to Greece and Rome, they borrowed their garden culture from the East, from Persia and from a common Islamic tradition that the Mughals would take into Afghanistan and India, propelled by the gardening passions of emperors such as Babur and Jahangir.

  Poetry was another medium in which the tulip took a starring role. As far back as the eleventh century, Persian poetry glowed with literal and metaphorical tulips, clothing the ground of plains and prairies, mountains and verdant hills, pleasure gardens and rocky deserts, their colour likened to rubies, cornaline, blood, the prince’s standard, even a dash of ink at the bottom of a coral inkpot. The classic harbinger of spring, a role played in Rome by the rose, tulips reminded Persian and Turkish poets of lips and cheeks, the flower’s wild origins setting it apart as ‘a stranger from the distant steppes’, barred from polite society and the conversation of roses.

  In Turkey as in Persia, a love of flowers bore the mark of divine approval. According to a preacher of the Sümbüliye dervish order, all gardeners would go to heaven to carry on their work, as this was where flowers belonged. To Turkish mystics, the tulip was doubly blessed; as the late Islamic scholar Annemarie Schimmel explained, ‘its very name, lâle, consists of the same letters as hilâl “crescent,” the symbol of Islam, and, even more important, as Allâh.’ But folk legend casts a darker shadow, attributing the tulip’s origins to the Turkish folk hero Ferhad, who tunnelled through a mountain for ten weary years to gain the love of Sirin, then killed himself with an axe on learning that she had died during his labours. From his blood sprang bright red tulips, like the windflowers, or anemones, in the Greek legend of Venus and Adonis.

  In court circles, the tulip and Ottoman floriculture generally gained ascendancy under Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520 to 1566), who had tulips embroidered on his gowns of satin brocade and embossed on his horse’s armour. Turkish florists began raising tulip cultivars from wild forms, known collectively as Lâle-i Rûmi (Ottoman tulips), and their favoured shape changed from the pot-bellied flowers of early Iznik ceramics to almond-shaped blooms with petals stretched impossibly thin, like blown glass. The Ottomans were also planting tulips in vast numbers. In 1574, Sultan Selim II is said to have ordered 50,000 tulip bulbs from a Syrian sharif, although other reports talk not of tulips but of 500,000 hyacinth bulbs.

  Confusion over the identity of the tulip filtered into the West, where it became known not as ‘lâle’ but as ‘tulipan’, an approximation of the Turkish word for turban, ‘dülbend’. The mix-up in translation is usually attributed to Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent who spent some eight years at Constantinople and later recounted his experiences in a series of entertaining letters, supposedly written at the time but actually composed many years later when his memory was fading.

  In a letter dated 1 September 1555, de Busbecq recalled his first journey to Constantinople in November 1554, almost certainly confusing it with a later journey he made in March 1558, when the tulips and other flowers he describes would have been in flower. After a day spent in Adrianople (modern Edirne, close to the Greek and Bulgarian borders), de Busbecq and his party set out for Constantinople, encountering ‘quantities of flowers, narcissi, hyacinths, and tulipans, as the Turks call them. We were surprised to find them flowering in mid-winter, scarcely a favourable season . . . The tulip has little or no scent, but it is admired for its beauty and the variety of its colours.’

  Although tradition also credits de Busbecq with introducing the first Turkish tulips into European gardens, he was in fact responsible for neither event. Towards the beginning of April 1559, a red tulip had already burst into flower in the magnificent Bavarian garden at Augsburg of Councillor Johannes Heinrich Herwart, sprung from seed procured from either Byzantium or Cappadocia. As tulips need at least five years to flower from seed, Councillor Herwart’s tulips were planted before de Busbecq even set out for Constantinople. Under the name ‘Tulipa Turcarum’, they were seen and described by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, then busy revising an annotated version of Dioscorides by Belon’s old master, Valerius Cordus. Gesner appended his tulip notes when the work was published two years later, his appetite whetted by drawings he had received earlier of two tulips, a red and a yellow, possibly from contacts in Padua, Venice or Bologna.

  19. Europe’s first garden tulip, seen and described by the Swiss botanist Conrad Gesner in 1559.

  Although Gesner described his tulip as having eight tepals (petals and outer sepals), the accompanying illustration – the first European woodcut of a tulip – shows a pot-bellied flower with six peeled-back petal tips, its stem rising stiffly out of broad crinkled leaves that float horizontally like seaweed. Its smell was pleasant, said Gesner, soothing and delicate but evanescent. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus would later name it Tulipa gesneriana in his honour, a name that encompassed all Europe’s first flush of cultivated tulips in the sixteenth and seventeenth centurie
s, which have since died out.

  De Busbecq’s description of Turkish tulipans nonetheless helps to explain the derivation of the word ‘tulip’ in most European languages. In both Persian and Ottoman Turkish, ‘lâle’ was the generic term for wild flowers, in contrast to ‘gül’, which referred to cultivated flowers. In Ottoman Turkey, garden tulips were known as ‘dülbend lalesi’ or ‘turban lâle’, doubtless because these were the pretty blooms worn in their turbans by Turkish flower lovers, making the tulip’s European derivation a partial rather than a full mistranslation. ‘Lâle’ in Ottoman Turkish came to be used for wild flowers of a red colour; it entered mystical literature as the ‘flower of blood’ and the ‘flower of suffering’, while ‘gül’ symbolized the soul in a state of ‘haraka’ or grace. (In Iran to this day, the tulip remains the flower of martyrdom, seen in cemeteries honouring those killed in the Iraq–Iran War, and it appears in stylized form on the Iranian flag.) Over time, ‘gül’ came to specify the rose just as ‘lâle’ came to signify the tulip. And to European eyes, the first Turkish tulips really did resemble the fantastic turbans of the Grand Turk. ‘After it hath beene some fewe daies flowred,’ declared John Gerard, ‘the points and brims of the flower turne backward, like a Dalmation or Turkes cap, called Tulipa, Tolepan, Turban, and Tursan, whereof it tooke his name.’

  AFTER GESNER, TURKISH tulips proliferated in Europe’s burgeoning botanical literature, just as they did in the best European gardens. The Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens included them in the first edition of his book on ornamental and fragrant flowers of 1568, although they are absent from the herbal he published five years earlier. Pierre Pena and Matthias de L’Obel introduced a long-stemmed tulip from Venice in their collaborative herbal of 1570, Stirpium Adversaria Nova; and de L’Obel described several more in his herbal of 1581.

  But the man who best records Europe’s growing fascination with this flamboyant introduction from the East is the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius, who first mentioned tulips in 1570 and wrote about them whenever he could thereafter, even when they had little relevance to his subject. A key figure in the story of European botany, Clusius had studied medicine in Montpellier under the great French physician and naturalist Guillaume Rondelet and gathered much of his information about tulips while supervising the imperial gardens at Vienna for the Habsburg emperor, Maximilian II.

  The flower’s earliest days in the Low Countries were hardly auspicious. From Vienna, Clusius tells the story of an Antwerp merchant who received a quantity of bulbs sent to him with exquisite cloths by a friend in Constantinople. Thinking they were onions, he ordered some to be roasted over glowing coals, then prepared with oil and vinegar; they cannot have been to his taste as he buried the remainder in his garden and quickly forgot about them. The few that survived were rescued by a merchant of Mechlin, one Joris Rye, a great plant lover, ‘and I am bound to state [wrote Clusius] that it is due to his care and zeal that I could later see their flowers, which were a delight, and a joy for the eyes because of their charming diversity’.

  By the time Clusius slipped tulips into his study of Spanish flora published in 1576, the varieties known in Europe included yellow, red, white, purple and variegated early-flowering tulips, and both red and yellow late-flowering varieties. Just seven years later, in his book on Austrian plants, he could identify thirty-four different kinds, among them a monstrosity of a three-flowered late tulip and four ‘intermediate’ tulips, which flowered midway between the others. A summation of all his tulip observations appeared in his collected masterwork, Rariorum Plantarum Historia, largely finished by 1593 when he moved to Leiden but not published until 1601.

  Europe’s rapidly expanding stock of tulips served to emphasize the flower’s chief attraction: its astonishing colour palette, which Clusius had not seen in any other flower except the opium poppy. ‘For the colour is either wholly yellow, or red, or white, or purple,’ he reported, ‘but sometimes one sees two or more of these colours mixed up in one and the same flower.’ Contrary to others’ claims, he had never encountered a blue tulip and he was scrupulous about describing only plants he had seen for himself, noting the smell of fresh wax or saffron in a certain yellow tulip and how its scent might weaken or disappear, and the way colours could change: attractive reds turning ungainly and dull, for instance, and dark purples fading to the colour of Damask or Provence roses.

  Already the flowers were showing signs of the breaking colours that fanned the flames of tulip mania, when – in the words of English botanist John Rea – ordinary tulips changed ‘into divers several glorious colours, variously mixed, edged, striped, feathered, garded, agotted, marbled, flaked, or specled, even to admiration’. Europeans were doubly bewitched because such changes were entirely unpredictable. Tulips grown from seed did not necessarily imitate their parents, and you could never predict when a plain tulip might ‘break’. Gambling on its occurrence was the obvious response to such kaleidoscopic beauty.

  Using observation alone, Clusius came close to discovering why tulips break into their constituent colours, having noticed from 1585 that tulips which had previously borne fine red flowers might suddenly produce a miscellany of reds and yellows, ‘sometimes the yellow occupying the middle of the segment, sometimes the red, or both colours being arranged in rays, diverging along the edges’. The same happened with yellow tulips showing red and yellow, and purples showing white and purple. ‘And this also I have also observed,’ Clusius went on, ‘that any tulip thus changing its original colour is usually ruined afterwards and wanted only to delight its master’s eyes with this variety of colours before dying, as if to bid him a last farewell.’

  As Clusius suspected, tulips that break are in fact sick plants, attacked by viruses transmitted by aphids; and the flaming and feathering admired as a sign of extreme beauty in reality heralded the plant’s gradual demise. Without knowing the cause, breeders engaged in a veritable alchemy of the tulip as they sought to transmute plain colours into feathered gold. Unconvinced by the sickness argument, the French florist Charles de la Chesnée Monstereul refused to divulge the ‘secret’ of perfecting tulips, wishing to reserve it for ‘Curious Sages’. John Rea singled out tulip colours likely to break (‘Orenge, Brimston, Hair, Dove, Gredeline, Isabella, Shamway, or any other light or strange colour’) and recommended planting the bulbs alternately in well-manured soil and that which is ‘lean and hungry’ to speed up the process.

  Relying on the botanist and horticultural writer Richard Bradley as his authority, England’s great eighteenth-century gardener Philip Miller quoted a Brussels grower whose land was virtually guaranteed to turn ordinary breeding tulips into fine variegated flowers, and a London gentleman whose tulip bed invariably produced fine striped tulips at each of its corners. Miller also passed on Bradley’s advice to check the circulation of colours by binding some, but not all, of the vessels in a tulip’s stem, but he discounted methods such as steeping the roots in coloured liquids, planting in coloured earths, inserting coloured powders into the roots, or drawing coloured silks through the roots. (All such sleights of hand vanished from his enormously successful Gardeners Dictionary, published seven years later, which simply recommended planting tulips in fresh soil each year.)

  The apothecary John Parkinson warned the prudent against white tulips that suddenly turned red or yellow, suggesting that such an ‘idle conceit’ could result only from a gardener’s trickery or one’s own mistaking. As mystified as everyone else, the Dutch astrological gardener Henry van Oosten attributed the capricious breaking of some but not all tulips to the fact ‘that one may be capacitated to receive the Influence, and the other not’.

  All this lay ahead, however. In the tulip’s early days in Europe, bulbs and seeds were eagerly passed from one plant enthusiast to another to mark their friendship and connection. The year after Clusius arrived in Vienna, the ‘illustrious Ogier de Busbeque’ – about to leave for Paris to look after the affairs of the Archduchess Isabella – gave him a quanti
ty of tulip seed and bulbs, which he had received from Constantinople the previous year. Judging the seed too old to germinate, Clusius delayed planting for another year and must have been delighted with the prodigious number of tulips produced, especially when these flowered after five or six years in a great variety of colours. Some may have found their way to England, as the Welsh writer and geographer Richard Hakylut reported in 1582 that, within the past four years, ‘there have bene brought into England from Vienna in Austria divers kinds of flowers called Tulipas, and those and other procured thither a little before from Constantinople by an excellent man called M. Carolus Clusius’.

  Other rare tulips came to Clusius from various sources: from the ‘generous Dame von Heyenstain’, who gave him the offset of a single rare bulb from Byzantium with sulphur-coloured flowers (it was killed by the bitter winter of 1586, and Clusius had to abandon the seed he had sown in his small Viennese garden when he left imperial service); from the nobleman Jean Boisot in Brussels; and from Johan van Hogelande, secretary to the board of Leiden’s Hortus Botanicus, who gave him a drawing and then his only bulb of a tulip with pointed petals that initially flowered green, turned light yellow at the edges, then flared into red. Clusius received another green tulip as a drawing from the naturalist and collector Jacques Plateau, observing that it looked like a small cauliflower but was ‘not inelegant’.

  Such genteel exchanges worked well when collectors shared a genuine interest in their rare plants. But the tulip was gaining a commercial value and Clusius’s gardens in Vienna, Frankfurt and then Leiden were repeatedly robbed of their precious bulbs. In 1581, his servant disappeared and important plants – including chests of bulbs – were subsequently sold. The following year Clusius lost most of his variegated tulips, unique specimens that he later found growing in the garden of an aristocratic Viennese lady who denied having bought them from his servant. Other floral connoisseurs were equally at risk.