Tulipomania - Mike Dash [15]
The time was now right for the tulip. With the discovery of silver mines in the Americas and trade routes to the Indies, there was more money about in Europe than ever before, and the rich were looking for interesting new ways to spend it. The Renaissance had reawakened interest in science, and printing had made both new discoveries and hoarded stores of older knowledge widely available. One consequence of these developments was that botany and gardening were greatly in fashion among the elite. Many of the most influential and affluent citizens of Europe planted their own gardens and wanted to stock them with rare and coveted plants. Even in Augsburg, Councilor Herwart’s collection was easily overshadowed by the gardens of the Fuggers, the fabulously rich Bavarian family of bankers who were to the fifteenth century what the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were to the twentieth. The Fuggers were growing tulips in Augsburg by the beginning of the 1570s.
There were tulips in Vienna by 1572. They were in Frankfurt by 1593, and they reached the south of France by 1598 (possibly much earlier). Bulbs were sent into England as early as 1582, where they were soon grown in great quantity. Before the end of the sixteenth century, endless ranks of new hybrids, each more colorful than the last, had already begun to make their appearance: James Garret, one of the best-known botanists in England, spent two decades producing new varieties—so many that even his friend John Gerrard (the curator of the physic garden of the London College of Physicians, who mentions them in a herbal published in 1597) confessed that “to describe them particularlie were to roule Sisiphus’s stone, or number the sandes.”
Garret was a Flemish immigrant who worked as a pharmacist and kept a garden at London Wall. His tulips—Gerrard mentions that he grew yellow, white, red, and lilac varieties—were valued not so much for their beauty as for their supposed medicinal properties. An English botanist, John Parkinson, whose celebrated treatise on flowers appeared some three decades later, mentions they could be mashed into red wine and drunk as a cure for “a cricke in the necke.” They were the stock from which many more varieties were grown; by the reign of Charles I (1625–49) and with the help of imports from the East, more than fifty different tulips were cultivated in the royal gardens.
Gerrard might not have felt able to make the effort to catalog all these flowers, but someone had to. The profusion of new varieties included tulips that differed one from another not merely in their color but in their height, the shape of their leaves, and whether they bloomed early or late. What the flower needed now, more than anything, was someone who could create order from the impending chaos. Without a sound system of classification, the whole genus could get mired in a botanical muddle from which it might never emerge. Without a system of evaluation, moreover—one that indicated which flowers were rare and covetable, and which common and worthless—a trade in tulips could never have developed.
Fortunately such a man existed. He was indisputably the greatest botanist of the sixteenth century, indeed one of the greatest of all time. He was to become, in important respects, the father of the tulip. His name was Carolus Clusius.
*A Turkish coin.
*Byzantium, that is, the Ottoman Empire.
†province in central Anatolia, still today the home of flourishing colonies of wild tulips.
CHAPTER 5
Clusius