Tulipomania - Mike Dash [43]
If a change in a Tulip is effected, one goes to a florist and tells him, and it soon gets talked about. Everyone is anxious to see it. If it is a new flower, each one gives his opinion; one compares it to this, another to that, flower. If it looks like an Admirael you call it a Generael, or any other name you fancy, and stand a bottle of wine to your friends that they may remember to talk about it.
Talk they did. By 1633 the combined efforts of the growers and the connoisseurs, the rhizotomi and the apothecaries, had all but solved the old problem of scarcity. Tulips were at last widely available throughout the Netherlands. A total of some five hundred different varieties were by then being grown in the Dutch Republic alone—some superbly fine and extremely rare, but others, still beautiful, rather easier to obtain. And as the supply of bulbs steadily increased, the flower began to attract new admirers among the tradesmen and working men of the Dutch Republic—men who had not until then been able to afford tulips or displayed much interest in the bulb trade.
In part this was the work of the growers. Their most important customers, the connoisseurs, were demanding ever finer and rarer tulips, which left the bulb farmers with the task of disposing of increasing quantities of the older, less spectacular varieties that naturally made up the bulk of their stock. They solved the problem by selling these flowers at low prices to new clients who had heard much excited talk about the beauty of the more fashionable varieties and wanted tulips of their own. Some of the more ambitious growers even took to offering unwanted bulbs to members of the army of peddlers who traveled from town to town selling their wares at local fairs and markets. These men hawked the flowers far and wide. They helped to introduce the ruder varieties to farmers, laborers, and polder boys out in the countryside and spread the gospel of the tulip far and wide.
In greater measure, though, the interest that many Dutchmen now developed in the flower trade owed less to the tulip’s natural beauty than to the dawning realization that money could be made in bulbs. That was something worth investigating. For money, despite the enormous wealth now flowing into the republic, was something many of its citizens saw all too little of.
CHAPTER 9
Florists
Foreigners who marveled at the wealth the Dutch enjoyed during their Golden Age never ceased to wonder how they did it. The regents and great merchants of the United Provinces might be rich, but the country they lived in was one of the poorest places in Europe. Few other nations were quite so lacking in fertile land, charming countryside, and a pleasant climate as the Dutch Republic; from the war-ravaged territories of the south to the immense peat bogs that sprawled across the northern provinces, there was almost nothing to suggest that this was a land of any promise.
Here was a nation described by one scornful Englishman as “an universall quagmire … the buttock of the world,” a country whose greatest city—Amsterdam—had been built on a swamp and could be reached only by braving the Zuider Zee, a fifty-mile-long inland sea full of sandbanks and treacherous shallows. It was a place where the air, in the words of the English ambassador, Sir William Temple, “would be all Fog and Mist, if it were not clear’d by the sharpness of their Frosts,” where the weather was “violent and surprising” and was so unhealthy, chill, and damp that it seemed to breed fevers and plague. For the regents of the Dutch Republic, money made this situation tolerable. Farmers, too, did well during the Golden Age—there were many mouths to feed in the republic, and there was additional demand for their produce from the Holy Roman Empire, where the Thirty Years’ War between the Protestant north and the Catholic south raged from 1618 to 1648, devastating local agriculture. But for ordinary workers—the weavers and carpenters, smiths, cobblers, and market tradesmen who lived in the towns and made up what the Dutch called the