Tulipomania - Mike Dash [51]
Entering the tulip trade was simple. Investing in a few bulbs required having a little money and access to a nearby nursery but little else. In the first half of 1635, then, the market for bulbs began to flourish as never before throughout the United Provinces, springing up wherever tulips were readily available. Groups of florists emerged in every town where connoisseurs or growers were already well established: in Haarlem and Amsterdam; in Gouda and Rotterdam; in Utrecht and Delft, Leiden and Alkmaar; and in Enkhuizen, Medemblik, and Hoorn.
The growers and the connoisseurs did more than simply provide the newcomers with stock. The trade they had created was already ordered and established. There were no arcane laws to master, no complications to be overcome. The rules for buying and selling flowers were based on simple common sense, and they were well known and well accepted long before the first florists began dealing in tulips.
The earliest sales were probably by the bulb, but this changed as the number of available flowers increased, and it would appear that by 1610 some less valuable tulips were already being sold “by the bed,” a unit of exchange that does not seem to have been precisely defined. The legal archives of Haarlem contain the record of the sale, in 1611, of four beds of tulips planted by an apothecary called Joos to one Jan Brants, who paid the already considerable sum of two hundred guilders. The next year Brants bought two more beds of tulips that belonged jointly to a certain Dammis Pietersz. and a Haarlem brewer named Augustijn Steyn. They cost him another 450 guilders.
Sometime after that (when is not clear) it became possible to buy and sell offsets as well as mother bulbs. This was an obvious next step, because logic dictated that offsets, which after all would soon become bulbs themselves, must be worth something in their own right. Nevertheless, this extension to the trade was fraught with difficulty because it was impossible to guarantee that offsets would mature satisfactorily or, as we have seen, that the tulips they produced would be identical to those of the mother bulb. Because of these problems, trading in offsets was something of a risk, and the idea took some time to win favor. When, in the spring of 1611, a Haarlem connoisseur named Andries Mahieu was asked if he would sell a linen merchant of his acquaintance some offshoots, he replied by asking his friend if he really wanted to buy “a cat in a bag.” This statement so imprinted itself in the mind of one bystander, the gardener Marten de Fort, that it survived to be recorded in the legal archives too.
Trading offsets was significant for another reason. Clusius and the other early growers already knew that bulbous plants prosper best if they are lifted from the soil soon after the flowers of one season have fallen, then are dried off and preserved aboveground until autumn. The buying and selling of bulbs therefore occurred only during the summer months when the tulips were out of the ground and could be physically exchanged. Offsets, on the other hand, mature only over a period of several years, so it was tempting to sell them when they first appeared.
Dealing in offsets was the first step to liberating the tulip trade from its traditional dependence on the calendar. Some of the buying and selling that had previously been crammed into no more than four months could now be spread throughout the year. By itself the sale of the odd offset a few months before it was actually ready to be separated from its