Books about antiques. - history of the tulip - Review - book review

Magazine Antiques, April, 2000 by Alfred Mayor

The tulip

First the Turks, then the Dutch, and finally the English attempted to coax the wild tulip into their private visions of what they wanted it to be. Their common problem was the perversity of the tulip, which, like the cat, resents being coaxed to do anything it has no mind to do. Tulip seeds take seven years to form a bearing bulb, and there is no telling what sort of variation on the parent flower will emerge. Only offsets--small bulblets that sometimes grow alongside the parent bulb--will produce identical blooms to the parent. The most tantalizing trait of all is the "break"--a bulb that has previously produced a white or yellow tulip, that suddenly comes up 'mixed, edged, striped, feathered, garded, agotted, marbled, flaked, or specled," as John Rea wrote in 1665.

Until the sharp eye of the electron microscope could be called into service in the early 1930s, no one knew what caused a break, which, like the equally elusive al-chemical gold, became infinitely desirable. To coax a tulip to break, early growers used a variety of entirely useless nostrums, including plaster from old walls, pigeon dung, or water from dung hills. Some strewed powdered paint of the desired shades on their tulip beds, hoping for the best. The author of this omnium gatherum of tulip lore comments that this practice was "no stranger than the alchemists' own attempts to turn base metal into gold. Indeed it was rather better, for while the alchemists consistently failed in their endeavours, it seemed that the tulip growers occasionally succeeded. They just did not know why."

Perhaps it was preferable to trade one's fortune for a single break of great beauty, than to know the humble cause of these magical mistakes--a virus deposited by an aphid, the peach potato aphid, Myzus persicae, being the most effective. The author comments: "The virus that affects the tulip is the only known instance of a plant disease which hugely increases the value of the infected plant. Since the turn of the century, however, when the single- coloured, mass-market Darwin tulips began to dominate the scene, breeders have done all they can to prevent breaking. The tulip, prized and cherished through more than 300 years as a jewel flower, refined and exquisite, revered for its individual intricacy, was redefined as brightly coloured wallpaper. Fortunately, it knows how to rebel. The joker still lurks in the tulip bed."

The Turks, the Texans of their time, took up the tulip in the mid-sixteenth century, bringing the native species from Central Asia and selecting the most anorexic and thin-hipped with six long petals as sharp as stilettos. The most excessive rime for the tulip was during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703-1730), who imported millions of bulbs from Holland. In the early eighteenth century Ahmed's son-in-law, the grand vizier Damat Ibrahim Pasha, had half a million bulbs blooming in his garden, according to the French ambassador to Constantinople at that time. During tulip season the grand vizier provided the sultan with nightly entertainment in the Ciragan gardens, lit by thousands of mirrored lanterns as well as candles mounted on the backs of ambling tortoises. Guests were required to dress in clothes that matched the colors of the tulips, which were set out in beds devoted to single varieties that were identified with silver filigree labels. And even out of season, tulips bloomed on tiles, and in painting s and book illustrations.

Europeans, in the beginning, approached the tulip much more casually In 1562 a merchant in Antwerp, who was sent some tulips along with bolts of cloth from Constantinople, thought they were onions, so he roasted them and doused them with oil and vinegar. The sixteenth-century botanist Charles de L'Ecluse, who related this story himself had tulip bulbs preserved in sugar, and when he ate them, he found them superior to orchid roots, which were also sometimes prepared the same way. However, he reformed and became closely involved with promoting the tulip as a flower in Europe.

In Holland, the inexplicable runup in tulip prices began in 1634, and it was soon infinitely less expensive to have the best artist paint you a portrait of tulips than buy a single coveted bulb. When the bubble burst in 1637, the backlash was predictable, causing one botany professor in Leiden to use his cane to level every tulip he came across.

In England, tulip growing became something of a team sport late in the eighteenth century, with societies of florists competing in shows for the finest flower Perfection was defined as a buxom beauty compared to the skinny, spiky ideal favored by the Ottoman Turks. The English generally agreed that the tulip "should grow with perfect symmetry, the flower well supported on a firm and elastic stem. The cup of the flower should be perfectly adapted to the stalk, appearing neither too light nor too heavy for it. The flower itself should be regular, perfect in the margins of the petals....and the petals of equal height, neither pointed, nor broken around the edges."