Tulipomania - Mike Dash [34]
Blond turns to gray
Light-hearted becomes grave
Red lips will turn blue
Beauteous cheeks will be dull
Agile legs become stiff
And nimble feet halt
Plump bodies lean
Fine skin wrinkled
Father Cats, as he was universally known, turned out more than a dozen books filled with this sort of verse, and something like fifty thousand copies of his complete poems found their way into Dutch homes; often a volume of Cats would be the only book in the house apart from a Bible. Many Dutch families regarded him fondly as an honest source of wisdom and saw his verses as a reliable guide to the moral problems of the day. If Jacob the poet thought there was nothing wrong with owning a country retreat, it was difficult to argue that there was.
This fashion for sumptuous country houses led naturally to the planting of many extensive country gardens. Dutch interest in horticulture had begun to flourish in the previous century and still showed no signs of abating. The grounds of Lord Offerbeake’s residence in Allofein, near Leiden (which an English member of Parliament, Sir William Brereton, visited in 1634), contained “spacious gardens and mighty great orchards, and a store of fish-ponds,” as well as twelve different varieties of hedgerow, a maze, long wooded walks, and of course a good number of flower beds. To be sure, Offerbeake’s was one of the grander plots in the United Provinces, but other wealthy men followed his example as best they could. Such gardens were regarded less as places of relaxation than as means of displaying the proprietor’s collection of plants.
The tacit approval of moralists such as Father Cats meant that the connoisseurs’ enthusiasm for the tulip, whose beauty was after all one of those minor miracles wrought by God and whose cultivation involved honest toil in the open air (an activity heartily recommended by Cats himself), escaped the censure it might otherwise have attracted from the more Calvinist elements of Dutch society, and the flower quickly became a prominent feature of many of the grandest new residences. One tulip garden that we know something about was planted at a country house called the Moufe-schans, which was celebrated in an epic poem of some sixteen thousand verses published in 1621 by a virulently anti-Spanish minister named Petrus Hondius. The Moufe-schans, which was built on the site of some German entrenchments dug during the Dutch Revolt and whose decidedly unbucolic name actually means “Trenches of the Krauts,” was owned by Johan Serlippens, the burgomaster of Neuzen. Serlippens invited his friend Hondius to stay with him, and in time the clergyman planted an herbal garden in the grounds that included six full beds of tulips, an impressive quantity for the time. Hondius probably had received some of his bulbs from Clusius and others from an apothecary friend, Christiaan Porret of Leiden.
Hondius was no tulip maniac. He grew all manner of plants in Serlippens’s garden, from carnations to hyacinths and narcissi, and he looked down on those who favored the tulip over other flowers, writing scathingly in his verse of those who had allowed themselves to get too caught up in the burgeoning craze:
All these fools want is tulip bulbs
Heads and hearts have but one wish
Let’s try and eat them; it will make us laugh
To taste how bitter is that dish
But the poet was himself far from immune to the new flower’s allure. In Of de Moufe-schans he challenged contemporary painters to capture the tulip’s beauty on canvas—only to admit, a line or two later, that the task was quite impossible. In his garden alone,