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By Root 147 0

before Clusius’s death, the broken tulips he grew in his private garden at Leiden were attracting the attention of connoisseurs eager to secure specimens of these unique new flowers for their own gardens. The old botanist soon found himself almost overwhelmed with requests for tulip bulbs. Many, he knew, came from people who merely wanted to follow the fashion for the flower and had no real interest in botany and no idea how to cultivate bulbs; others were from people he suspected of planning to sell his bulbs for whatever they could get. In any case, his own supplies were not remotely adequate to meet the demand. “So many ask for them,” he wrote to his friend Justus Lipsius, a humanist scholar who had been one of the pillars of Leiden University in its formative years, “that if I were to satisfy every demand, I would be completely robbed of my treasures, and others would be rich.”

Unfortunately for Clusius, some at least of those who implored him for bulbs would not take no for an answer. Just as he had been in Vienna, he began to be plagued by repeated thefts from his garden. Twice during the summer of 1596 and again in the spring of 1598, thieves stole tulip bulbs from him while he was away. The total loss must have been substantial, because we know from Clusius’s surviving letters that more than a hundred bulbs were taken in just one of these raids. The old man was so distressed by the loss—and by the familiar disinterest that the authorities at Leiden showed in investigating the thefts—that he vowed to give up gardening altogether and disperse the rest of his collection among his friends.

Over the years Clusius’s reputation has suffered from the suggestion made by one contemporary chronicler that these thefts occurred because he asked an exorbitant price for his flowers and stubbornly refused to hand over bulbs to anyone who would not meet it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout his long career the botanist showed great generosity in sending samples of his finds to friends for nothing—“con amore,” as he sometimes put it in his letters—and the only people he refused to supply were those he suspected would not value his gifts. The people who organized the theft of his bulbs at Leiden fell into the latter category, and Clusius was surely right to suspect their motives from the start.

Nevertheless, the thefts did have one positive result. Clusius’s tulips were far from the only ones in the United Provinces in the 1590s, but his collection was certainly the most varied and the best. As a result of the thefts these precious bulbs were distributed throughout the Netherlands, north and south, and they flourished. In some of their new homes, at least, they must have become parents of new hybrids, varieties that in their turn bred and formed an important part of the stock of bulbs traded in the next century. The Leiden bulbs thus became the progenitors of the flowers traded later in the century, and thanks in part to them, in the words of a chronicler, “the seventeen provinces were amply stocked.”

*Surnames were still relatively uncommon in the United Provinces in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Most people still identified themselves using patronymics—Walich Ziwertsz. would have been the son of one Ziwert or Sievert. Because it was unwieldy to spell out the full patronymic, which in this case would be Ziwertszoon (“Ziwert’s son”), it was also common practice to abbreviate written names by placing a period after the z of “son.” When spoken, the name would have been pronounced in full.

CHAPTER 7

An Adornment to the Cleavage

The spectacular colors and endless variations of the tulip marked it from its first discovery as an exceptional flower. There was general agreement on this point, not only between Turks and Dutchmen but also among botanists of every nationality, and by 1600 it had been widely acclaimed throughout Europe. The tulip, the French horticulturalist Monstereul wrote a little later, was supreme among flowers in the same way that humans were lords of the animals, diamonds