Tulipomania - Mike Dash [24]
Carolus Clusius was without question the most important botanist of his day. He was a true scientist whose greatest works, such as his surveys of the plants of Austria and Spain, remained the standard texts on their subject for more than a century. He was also a pioneer in the most literal sense—the brief history of fungi that he published in 1601 was more or less the first thing that had ever been written on the subject. For the last quarter century of his life he served as a sort of living vade mecum for the botanists and flower lovers of Europe, keeping up a vast correspondence. This, and his particular interest in bulbous plants, ensured that the tulip spread far more rapidly through Europe than might otherwise have been the case. From this point of view he really was, in the words of another valued compliment—this one from the pen of Prince Emanuel of Portugal—“true monarch of the flowers.”
Yet Clusius’s importance, during his final years at Leiden, lay not so much in the bulbs he brought to the university as in how he studied them once they were planted. The old botanist was not the first person to grow tulips in the United Provinces; according to one reliable chronicler, that honor belonged to an Amsterdam apothecary named Walich Ziwertsz.,* a Protestant fanatic who is remembered chiefly for his denunciation of the popular custom of celebrating the festival of St. Nicholas on December 25. Ziwertsz. is known to have cultivated tulips in his garden before 1573, when Clusius was still in Vienna. Nor was the master of the hortus even the first person to raise the flower in Leiden; his own friend Johan van Hoghelande had planted bulbs at the university before his arrival, having received a small stock from Joris Rye. He was, however, the only man in the United Provinces—perhaps in all Europe—who was perfectly qualified to describe and catalog and understand the flower.
Clusius’s first discussion of tulips appeared in his description of Spanish plant life, the Historia of 1576. Over the years he amended and expanded this early work, publishing enlarged treatises on the flower in 1583 and finally in his masterpiece, the Rariorum Plantarum Historia, which appeared in 1601 while he was still at Leiden. It is largely thanks to these works that we know as much as we do about the early history of the tulip in Europe. Clusius’s treatises also included a detailed description of the flowers he had personally encountered or heard of from his many correspondents. In common with all contemporary botanists who took an interest in the genus, he was principally impressed by the ease with which new varieties of tulip could be produced. No other flower, he observed—except perhaps the poppy—was remotely as diverse.
Thanks largely to the efforts of the gardeners of Istanbul, the number of tulip variants known in Europe—each distinguishable by its unique color scheme or the shape and arrangement of its leaves and petals—was already substantial in Clusius’s day. The botanist himself was able to catalog no fewer than thirty-four separate groups, which he classified according to their colors and their shape. He was also the first to distinguish between early-, mid-, and late-flowering tulips, of which the first appear in March and the last not until May.
Working from the solid foundation that Clusius provided, later botanists have added considerably to our understanding of the tulip. The flower has now been grouped with other bulbous plants such as the iris, the crocus, and the hyacinth and is classified among the Liliaceae. In all about 120 different species of tulip—and countless individual varieties