Tulipomania - Mike Dash [39]
Nor were the rhizotomi the only people searching the countryside for rare plants in the first years of the new century; wild tulips were increasingly available from apothecaries too, collected during trips to gather medicinal plants and herbs. Among those known to have stocked the bulbs are three Dutchmen: Willem van de Kemp of Utrecht, Petrus Garret of Amsterdam, and Christiaan Porret of Leiden.
Apothecaries—early pharmacists who peddled folk and quack remedies to those who could not afford the services of the few qualified physicians of the time—were as commonplace in the seventeenth century as pharmacists are today. They wore the same uniform as doctors—black robes and coat, collar bands, and a pointed hat—but their premises were easily identified by their traditional symbol, a stuffed crocodile, which generally hung suspended from the ceiling over the counter.
Principled though some undoubtedly were, apothecaries shared with the rhizotomi a certain notoriety as disreputable opportunists in the first years of the seventeenth century. They had only recently left the grocers’ guild, to which they had belonged for centuries, to join the physicians—so recently, indeed, that their shops were still the only places where Dutchmen were allowed to buy fruit tarts. But many apothecaries had come up with better ways of making money than that. Their premises often doubled as clandestine drinking dens, and many secretly offered medical consultations, which were really supposed to be the monopoly of physicians. Such men were happy to meet the growing demand for tulips by supplying dried bulbs. Some of their customers were genuine flower lovers and connoisseurs, but it appears that the more unscrupulous apothecaries also promoted bulbs as an aphrodisiac.
It was only gradually, between the years 1600 and 1630, that the buccaneering rhizotomi and the apothecaries were supplanted by the new breed of respectable professional nurserymen. Many of these growers were based in Haarlem, the second largest city in the province of Holland, which had been built on the sort of poor, sandy soil that was ideally suited to the cultivation of tulips. They favored small plots of rented land just outside the city walls and within easy walking distance of the gates. According to Haarlem tradition, most of the city’s tulip gardens were just outside the Grote Houtpoort—the Great Wood-Gate—that guarded one of the two southern entries to the town. But perhaps the best of Haarlem’s little flower farms were situated along the bosky Kleine Houtweg, the Little Wood-Road, which ran from the other gate on the south side of the city down through an area still known today as the rose district and on to the famous Haarlem Wood, which was the city’s favorite beauty spot. More than twenty nurserymen were based along this road, and it was here that the famous tulip grower David de Mildt, who figures prominently in many of the surviving records of the mania, had his garden at a spot named Twijnderslaan. When de Mildt died, aged only thirty-three, at the height of the craze, his plot was taken over by another prominent tulip grower, Barent Cardoes, and renamed the Garden of Flora. Under Cardoes’s management, it became one of the best-regarded bulb farms in Holland.
Barent Cardoes learned his trade working for another Haarlem grower, the celebrated Pieter Bol. Bol was the creator of Violetten Anvers Bol and several other superbly fine