Tulipomania - Mike Dash [40]
Da Costa was a Portuguese grower who made a name for himself by the sheer variety of tulips he created. He seems never to have mastered the Dutch tongue with much confidence—the manuscript of a gardening book he commissioned for his own use still survives, which lists the names of all his flowers phonetically for his benefit—but he was an unparalleled innovator in the garden. No fewer than eight varieties bore his name. One of his most famous creations was Paragon da Costa—a Paragon being generally defined as a variety that was an improvement on an existing flower, usually because its colors were finer or more intense. On that basis, Francisco da Costa’s proudest achievement was probably Paragon Viceroy da Costa, a tulip that claimed to improve on the unimprovable Viceroy.
For an immigrant such as da Costa, tulip farming was attractive for precisely the same reasons that it appealed to many of the Dutch. Little investment was required, a small plot of land and some tulip seed or bulbs being all that was required to start; tulips were hardy and grew well in poor soil; and bulb growers were not required to belong to any of the restrictive and expensive guilds that so rigorously controlled most of the trades and professions in the Dutch Republic.
To anyone who was at all horticulturally inclined, however, it was the profits that could be made in the tulip trade that proved most alluring. Individual growers certainly became wealthy. Pieter Bol’s name is mentioned as one of those who profited most from the flower business, but when the Haarlem dealer Jan van Damme died in 1643, he left an estate consisting primarily of tulip bulbs that was valued at 42,000 guilders, a fortune that ranked him alongside many of the wealthy merchants who had made their money in the rich trades.
Where did all this money come from? Successful growers such as van Damme owed their success to an ability to exploit every possible market for their bulbs. Most found ready customers among the connoisseurs and the owners of fashionable new country houses, but they were also happy to sell their bulbs to members of the emerging merchant class as well. And from as early as 1610 a few intelligent horticulturalists were selling their tulips in the Holy Roman Empire and, no doubt, the southern Netherlands and northern France. What started as a very minor export trade indeed grew, slowly but surely, to the point where in the first quarter of the eighteenth century the Dutch were shipping cargoes of bulbs to North America, the Mediterranean, and even the Ottoman Empire.
Perhaps the first Dutch bulb dealer to move into the export trade was Emanuel Sweerts, another old friend of Clusius’s who kept a curiosity shop in Amsterdam and was active in the first decade of the century. He not only imported bulbs from all over Europe but began to offer tulips for sale at the Messe, a vast fair held each year at Frankfurt am Main. (The Frankfurt Book Fair, which still attracts tens of thousands of publishers to the city each year, is actually a survivor of this tremendous medieval market.)
The increasing professionalism of the bulb trade posed one important problem for men such as Emanuel Sweerts. Tulips were in flower for only a few days each year; they had to be sold as bulbs. But these plain brown packages offered no clue to the glories they concealed within, and they certainly did not look like an enticing investment. Sweerts came up with the solution: a catalog packed with illustrations portraying his tulips in all their glory. He persuaded the most