Tulipomania - Mike Dash [98]
Preferences had not changed much, and the margrave’s flowers would have been recognizably descendants of the tulips grown during the years of mania. The mosaic virus remained undiscovered, and brightly colored flamed tulips remained highly popular. Indeed, the desiderata applied to the most coveted varieties would have been perfectly familiar to a flower dealer of the 1630s: In 1700 Henrik van Oosting’s The Dutch Gardener noted that the ideal tulip should have “petals that are rounded at the top, and these should not be curled … as for the flames, these must start low, beginning at the base of the Flower and climbing right up the Petal, and ending in the form of a shell at the edge of the flower…. As regards the base, it must be of the finest Sky Blue, and the Stamens should seem to be Black, although they are really of a very dark Blue.” The Dutch Florist, a book by Nicholas van Kampen translated into English in 1763, added that the “properties required of a fine tulip” were a tall stem, a well-proportioned cup, and lively colors, preferably on a background of white.
Even so, no plant, not even the tulip, could hope to remain in fashion forever. Tastes changed; other flowers offered something different. Although the French in the eighteenth century and the English in the nineteenth retained a passion for the flower, the tulip was often relegated to the second rank as other species briefly came into vogue and occasionally generated miniature manias in their own right.*
Perhaps the most striking of these affairs was the hyacinth trade, that grew up in the United Provinces in the first third of the eighteenth century. Like the tulip, the hyacinth was introduced to Western Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Clusius knew it and distributed its bulbs, and it was cultivated in the Netherlands in a minor way for several decades without arousing any great passion among flower lovers. Then chance intervened. Over the years growers trying to create new varieties had accidentally produced a few double hyacinths—flowers with twice the usual number of petals. Because these plants did not produce seeds, they were routinely destroyed, and hyacinths occupied a station in the florists’ pantheon below those of the tulip and the carnation. In 1684, however, a Haarlem bulb farmer named Pieter Voorhelm fell ill and was unable to tend his garden for some time. When he recovered and went to dispose of some double hyacinths he had been meaning to get rid of, he discovered that an especially fine double had flowered and that some of his customers wanted to buy it. Not only that—they were willing to pay more for the new flower than they were for the single hyacinths he produced.
Voorhelm continued to grow the new variety, and as demand slowly increased, he bred more doubles. Other growers followed suit, until by about 1720 the hyacinth was definitely in fashion and had quite eclipsed the tulip in popularity.
The craze that ensued bore strong similarities to the tulip mania, and it even ran its course more or less exactly a century after tulips were in vogue. It began slowly and did not reach a peak until 1736, half a century after Voorhelm first grew a double hyacinth. Relatively early on the prices for single bulbs of the most prized species reached thirty or forty guilders, and before the fashion had run its course, the Semper Augustus of the hyacinth years—a double named Koning van Groot Brittannië, in honor of William of Orange—was fetching a thousand guilders a bulb.
Hyacinths were popular for exactly the same reason that tulips had captured the imagination. It took a similarly long time—five years—to produce a flowering bulb, which meant that popular new hyacinths remained rarities for some time. The new varieties were highly variegated, exhibiting endless combinations of color, and so