Tulipomania - Mike Dash [14]
A similar confusion unfortunately swirls about the part Busbecq may have played in giving the flower its familiar name. The Turks, of course, called the tulip lale, and Busbecq is generally believed to have described it as a tulipan because of the petals’ resemblance to a folded turban—dulbend to the Turks, and tulband to the people of the Netherlands. A comparison of this sort could well explain how the word tulip entered the English language, but it cannot have been as a consequence of Busbecq’s travels. The term has been traced back as far as 1578, when it appeared in a translation of a botanical work that had originally been published in Latin, so it was certainly in circulation before the ambassador published his famous letters. It took time, in any case, for the word tulip to be generally accepted; in the late sixteenth century European botanists most often referred to the flower as lilionarcissus, emphasizing its kinship with more familiar bulbous plants.
It was in the year 1559, then, that the first tulip definitely known to have flowered in Europe appeared. It grew in the garden of a certain Johann Heinrich Herwart, a councilor of Augsburg, in Bavaria. The town was part of the Holy Roman Empire—that remarkable agglomeration of German cities and states that endured from the Dark Ages until its dissolution at the hands of Napoleon, and of which it is important to remember only, in Voltaire’s famous phrase, that “it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”—and Herwart’s garden appears to have been one of its principal adornments. It was certainly well enough known to attract visitors from some distance away.
One of these who came and saw the new flower Herwart had grown was a natural scientist called Conrad Gesner, who lived in Zürich. Like many scholars of that time, Gesner was a polymath who studied zoology as well as botany, and he was also a doctor of medicine; one of his most remarkable cases concerned a mysterious epidemic during which snakes and newts were seen crawling from the stomachs of the recently dead. By the late 1550s he was already compiling the important works of natural history for which he is best remembered, including a comprehensive botany called the Catalogus plantarum. He was, in short, well able to understand the significance of the brilliant import he found in Herwart’s flower beds.
“In the month of April 1559,” Gesner recalled, “I saw this plant displayed, sprung from a seed that had come from Byzantia* or as others say from Cappadocia.† It was flowering with a single beautifully red flower, large, like a red lily, formed of eight petals of which four were outside and the rest within. It had a very sweet, soft and subtle scent which soon disappeared.” The sketch that Gesner made of his short-stemmed scarlet flower still survives, covered with scribbled marginal notes and queries that pay mute tribute to his interrogative mind. It shows a comfortably rounded flower with tight-wrapped petals curling delicately outward at the tips. (There are only six petals, the normal number, in this watercolor, rather than the eight Gesner mentioned in his written description, leaving open the interesting question of whether this pioneer tulip was actually a “sport,” or mutation.) Gesner called it Tulipa turcarum, acknowledging that its provenance was the Ottoman realm.
By the time the Swiss scientist completed his sketch