Tulipomania - Mike Dash [37]
Throughout the 1620s the wealthy connoisseurs of the republic bombarded the man with ever more extravagant offers for a single bulb. The sums they were willing to pay were not just large, they were spectacular; van Wassenaer records that in 1623 twelve thousand guilders was not enough to procure ten bulbs. The reclusive connoisseur who grew the flower, he states, valued the private satisfaction of gazing on the beauty of Semper Augustus over any potential profit. Yet his refusal to consider offers merely drove his desperate colleagues to raise their bids. Next summer offers as high as two or three thousand guilders a bulb were made—and just as summarily rejected.
It is with the mysterious Semper Augustus, then, that the first symptoms of what would become known as tulip mania appear. Quite how the flower first made its way to the United Provinces is not known. According to van Wassenaer, the tulip was grown originally from seed owned by a florist in northern France, but not recognizing its value, he disposed of it for a pittance. This must have been around the year 1614. Ten or twelve years later, when the species had eclipsed all other flowers, connoisseurs from Holland hurried south to scour the nurseries and gardens of Flanders, Brabant, and northern France for other specimens of the Semper Augustus. It was a fantastically difficult task, and they met with no success. A few similarly patterned flowers were located—one even received the name Parem Augusto, in honor of its apparent kinship—but somehow none quite matched the empress of tulips in the vividness of its color or the purity of its form.
This failure forced Dutch connoisseurs to try a new tack, and for a while they attempted to promote the most gorgeous specimens from their own collections as rivals to Semper Augustus. Van Wassenaer mentions the varieties Testament Clusii, Testament Coornhert, Motarum van Chasteleyn, and Jufferkens van Marten de Fort in this connection, but striking though these flowers were, none of them excited anything like the admiration reserved for the red-flamed empress. Nor did persistent rumors that a tulip eclipsing even Semper Augustus in beauty had been found growing in a garden in Cologne ever amount to anything.
In the end, though, all the mysterious owner’s efforts to control the supply of Semper Augustus proved to be in vain. Van Wassenaer explains that early on the connoisseur who had discovered the variety did agree to sell a single precious bulb, for the not-inconsiderable sum of a thousand guilders. When the flower was lifted from its bed, he saw that it had grown two offsets from its base. This discovery mortified the connoisseur, who might reasonably have demanded three thousand guilders, rather than one thousand, for the tulip, but it was a piece of tremendous good fortune for the buyer, who had every incentive to sell one of the offsets to recoup his investment in the flower. He now held the makings of a valuable collection in his hand.
From this uncertain start Semper Augustus did very gradually become available to those who could afford to pay for it. Bulbs of this most highly sought-after of flowers appear to have produced viable offsets only rarely—this was a characteristic of the most superbly fine tulips, perhaps because they were more heavily infected with the mosaic virus than were ruder varieties—and even a decade later only a handful existed. Of course, the continued rarity of Semper Augustus did not stop connoisseurs from coveting the flower; in fact, it merely fanned their ardor. That was as good a measure as any of the frenzy for rare bulbs that was now beginning to well up inside the Dutch Republic.
The scarcity of tulips in seventeenth-century Holland is central to a proper understanding of the bulb craze. To a Dutchman of the Golden Age, the tulip was not a mundane and readily available