Tulipomania - Mike Dash [38]
A handful of tulip connoisseurs had always produced their own flowers and been keen and able horticulturalists in their own right. For example, the brothers Balthasar and Daniël de Neufville—a pair of rich linen merchants from Haarlem—bred two new varieties, one a Rosen and the other a Violetten, which they grew in the garden of a house just inside the city walls that they had named “the Land of Promise.” Most of their contemporaries, however, were less skilled, and by the late 1620s it was increasingly apparent that demand for tulips could no longer be met simply by the exchange of small quantities of bulbs among connoisseurs. New enthusiasts for the flower, who had none of the skills needed to breed varieties of their own and few of the connections necessary to obtain bulbs in the traditional way, had begun to enter the market. Some possessed extensive gardens and wished to cultivate tulips of many different varieties. These newcomers were forced to look elsewhere for their supplies.
They turned to the handful of professional horticulturalists who had begun to cultivate the fashionable new flowers. This was a key development in the history of the tulip, for there can be no doubt that without the efforts of the professionals many fewer new varieties would have been developed. The total quantity of bulbs in circulation would have been less too, and the speed with which the tulip spread across the United Provinces would have been reduced.
By 1630 professional flower growers could be found in almost every town in the Dutch Republic. Most cultivated all manner of flowers, although a number, such as Henrik Pottebacker of Gouda—creator of the Rosen variety Pottebacker Gevlamt and the rust-and-yellow-flamed Bizarden Admirael Pottebacker—had begun to specialize in tulips. They were expert horticulturalists and—just as importantly—they had a keen eye for what was valuable and what would sell.
At the top of the market Semper Augustus’s closest rivals included Viceroy—a big, bold, purple-flamed flower generally recognized as the king of the Violetten—and at the head of the Bizarden, a flower called Root en Gheel van Leyde (“Red and yellow of Leiden”). At the bottom, the cheapest and least coveted flowers were simple unicolored flowers, their petals colored yellow, red, or white, which—being the earliest of all Dutch tulips—were also the most common.
Gardeners such as Pottebacker had not sprung from nowhere. They had learned their skills from earlier, less polished growers who had existed in small numbers since the end of the sixteenth century and scratched a living in the limited markets of the day. Clusius and his circle of aristocratic friends possessed a low opinion of these first professionals, criticizing them for their often alarming ignorance of botany and despising their willingness to bestow crudely populist names on the new varieties that occasionally appeared—more, perhaps, by luck than judgment—in their gardens. Nevertheless, they grew tulips, and they were learning.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the handful of pioneer bulb farmers (who then based themselves in the countryside just outside Brussels) were having to compete with an even more discreditable group of itinerant flower collectors. These restless individualists scoured the countryside—mostly in France—for unusual specimens and sold them to collectors, mostly in the Netherlands. They called themselves rhizotomi (the word is Greek for “root cutters”), and even Clusius, in his declining years, found them useful sources of flowers that he was no longer mobile enough to collect for himself.
At least a few of the rhizotomi were honorable men—Clusius names Nicolas le Quilt of Paris and Guilielmus Boëlius as