Tulipomania - Mike Dash [100]
The story of the tulip can be brought up to the present day in a very few words. The trade has continued to be dominated and driven forward by Dutch growers. Indeed, for much of the eighteenth century a single group of a dozen Haarlem florists effectively controlled the entire business. Even when their oligopoly was broken during the Napoleonic Wars, the reputation of Dutch farmers remained unparalleled, and as more and more people took up gardening as a hobby and worldwide demand for flowers of all sorts soared, the area around Haarlem given over to the cultivation of bulbs increased too. First farms appeared in Bloemendaal and Overveen, just to the west of the city; then cultivation expanded south toward Hillegom and Lisse on land made available by the draining of the Haarlemmermeer in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was around this time that individual bulb farms expanded in size too, creating the first of the huge tulip fields that have become one of the most popular picture-postcard images of Holland. Next—with almost all the fertile land around Haarlem given over to flowers—a portion of the bulb trade moved away from the city altogether. Today more tulips are produced by the farms of North Holland than come from Haarlem.
There have been other fundamental changes too. Bulb growers have now mastered the techniques necessary to produce tulips all year round. By keeping bulbs at low temperatures in a state of suspended animation, it is now possible to have them flower as desired. The long wait for the next tulip time, which frustrated flower lovers for centuries, no longer exists, and with it has vanished the single most essential precondition of the tulip mania.
Most fundamentally of all, the tulip itself has changed. In the 250 years that have passed since the mania subsided, Dutch farmers have introduced several radically different species to gardens, from parrot tulips, with their twisted leaves and big, beak-tipped petals, to double tulips, with their extra complement of petals, to Darwins—hybrid giants first bred in the nineteenth century. The broken tulips that once achieved such fame, on the other hand, no longer exist. Weakened as they were by the mosaic virus, the original species—including even famed varieties such as Viceroy and Semper Augustus—were in any case doomed to flourish for only a short time, but even their successors are long gone now; for years the only flared and flamed tulips available to gardeners have been imitations produced by careful cross-breeding.
The bulb industry views the destruction of the mosaic virus as one of its proudest achievements, and with good reason. It is the florists’ equivalent of the elimination of smallpox. Yet it can hardly be denied that something has been lost in the winning of this war. The infinite variety that each broken tulip could display is gone, and with it much of the flower’s capacity to fascinate and astound.
Today the bulb trade offers not variety but varieties: a huge and ever-growing array of different tulips. The flower lover of Clusius’s day had only a handful of species to enjoy, but now close to six thousand different tulips have been bred, described, and cataloged.
This dazzling array of choice is certainly impressive in itself; yet it unarguably lessens the importance of individual flowers. The modern fashion for expanses of uniform and unicolored tulips would certainly strike the seventeenth-century connoisseur, with his exemplars planted in their own small beds, as rather vulgar; and surely no modern gardener studies his flowers with the intensity of an old-time tulipophile, or knows each one so