Tulipomania - Mike Dash [36]
From a distance, and with this strange invention’s help, Pauw’s single tulip bed looked densely planted with hundreds of brilliant flowers. It was only when a curious or appreciative visitor approached more closely that he would realize it was just an optical illusion. The mirrors of the wooden cabinet had turned the few dozen tulips in Pauw’s collection into a spectacular profusion.
For the lord of Heemstede, the looking-glass cabinet was an unfortunate necessity. Pauw needed it because there were some things even he could not buy. Rich and influential though he was, the burgomaster of Amsterdam could not obtain enough tulips to fill his garden, and all the efforts of the best gardeners in Holland could not persuade the bulbs that he already had to multiply as quickly as he wanted.
Pauw’s problem was a simple one. The superbly fine varieties that he collected were extremely rare, because they were the products of a long process of selective breeding. Ever since the earliest Dutch tulips had flowered in Walich Ziwertsz.’s Amsterdam garden, connoisseurs had been carefully selecting the most exquisite specimens, cultivating them with special care, and crossing them with other fine bulbs to create ever more beautiful varieties. Thus while the earliest, rudest tulips had had decades to multiply, the most valuable flowers, those that bore the most delicate colors, were only recent creations. The finest tulips of all were available in such small quantities that not even Adriaen Pauw could obtain them.
Of all the varieties acclaimed “superbly fine,” easily the most coveted was a flower called Semper Augustus, the most celebrated, the scarcest, and by common consent the most wonderful tulip grown anywhere in the United Provinces during the seventeenth century—and thus also by far the most expensive. Semper Augustus was a Rosen tulip, but to call it simply a red and white flower would be like describing rubies and emeralds as red and green stones. Everyone who saw it concurred that it was a plant of quite exceptional beauty. It had a slender stem that carried its flower well clear of its leaves and showed off its vivid colors to the best effect. Beginning as a solid blue where the stem met the flower’s base, the corolla quickly turned pure white. Slim, blood-colored flares shot up the center of all six petals, and flakes and flashes of the same rich shade adorned the flower’s edges. Those fortunate enough to actually see a specimen of Semper Augustus in flower thought it a living wonder, as seductive as Aphrodite.
In truth, though, very few people ever had this privilege. Although the tulip was endlessly hymned by the connoisseurs, illustrated in more tulip books than any other variety, and mentioned so frequently in connection with the bulb craze that it has become virtually synonymous with it, Semper Augustus was practically never actually traded. It was so rare that there were simply no bulbs to be had.
The earliest mentions of the flower date only to the 1620s. By 1624—according to the Dutch chronicler Nicolaes van Wassenaer, who is virtually the only reliable source on the subject—no more than a dozen examples were then in existence, and all twelve were in the hands of a single man who was generally rumored to live in Amsterdam. The identity of this unknown connoisseur is one of the great mysteries of the tulip craze. Van Wassenaer is careful not to name him, and in the absence of any other evidence, it seems unlikely that the puzzle will ever be solved. This, perhaps, is what the reclusive connoisseur would have wished, because the chronicler makes it clear that he was determined not to part with his flowers at any price.
He could have sold his bulbs, easily. At a time when tulips were increasingly widely cultivated, the fact that no more than a dozen specimens of a superbly fine variety were in existence made