Tulipomania - Mike Dash [42]
With tulip books at their disposal, Dutch nurserymen were armed with a valuable sales tool that could be used to attract more customers and lure existing ones to try new varieties. But the surviving albums, thronged with page after page of all but identical Rosen, Violetten, and Bizarden flowers, inadvertently make an important point about the often-chaotic workings of the seventeenth-century flower trade.
One of the major difficulties facing both growers and connoisseurs was the problem of distinguishing between strikingly similar varieties. Even the most knowledgeable dealers and growers must have found it difficult, if not impossible, to tell one Rosen tulip from another with almost identical markings, even though those varieties might be worth very different sums. This problem lay at the root of a number of the sometimes bitter disputes between growers and their customers that dot the surviving records of the flower trade.
The fact that tulips of the same variety differed one from another and from generation to generation did not help; nor did the plethora of confusingly similar names that were bestowed upon new flowers by their creators. Outsiders found the chaotic nomenclature of Dutch tulips almost impossible to grapple with. In this early period there were no firm rules and certainly no central authority that could impose any sort of order on the way tulips were named. Anyone who created a new variety had the privilege of conferring a title upon it, and generally they chose either to give it an overblown name that hinted at the exceptional qualities they felt it possessed, or to name it after themselves. Quite frequently they managed to do both.
The man who inadvertently found himself responsible for this craze was the bailiff of Kennermerland, the coastal region between Haarlem and the sea. He created a Rosen tulip of exceptional beauty, and casting around for a name to convey its excellence, he decided to christen it Admirael (“admiral”). Before long the Admirael name had become the highest epithet to which a tulip could aspire, and other growers flocked to apply it to their own creations: Admirael Liefkens, Admirael Krijntje, Admirael van Enckhuysen, and the most celebrated of all, Admirael van der Eijck. Foreigners sometimes made the mistake of believing that these flowers were named after naval heroes of the Dutch Revolt, but of course they really commemorated not sailors but the horticulturists who had created the flower. At the time of the tulip mania there were already about fifty different varieties with the Admirael prefix, and another thirty or so that bore the rival title Generael (“general”). The Generaels included one flower that had been named Generael van der Eijck, perhaps in the hope of persuading potential buyers that its qualities matched those of the fabled Admirael tulip.
Nor did matters end there. Once the fashion for Admiraels and Generaels had run its course, growers took the logical next step of searching for new superlatives and created a class of plants named Generalissimo. Next came varieties named after real Classical heroes such as Alexander the Great and Scipio, and eventually two tulips from Gouda titled, with breathtaking arrogance, “Admiral of Admirals” and “General of Generals.” At least these really were superbly fine varieties, noted for their size and fiery scarlet stripes.
Such practices meant that many inferior tulips received the Admirael or Generael name, and customers could not necessarily even determine the sort of flower they were buying simply from its title. Generaels, for example, were almost always Rosen tulips, but at least three Violettens bore the name, and there were Violetten and even Bizarden Admiraels. Naturally all this confusion meant that growers had to do what they could to publicize the new varieties they had created. One contemporary writer explained