Tulipomania - Mike Dash [99]
During the 1720s, then, bulb prices began to rise. In one sense this was odd, because the cultivation of bulbs was a considerably more professional business in the eighteenth century than it had been a hundred years earlier, and new varieties of double hyacinth soon began to flood onto the market—a total of two thousand were eventually produced. That might have sated demand and prevented a real mania from developing. But the bulb growers of Haarlem had accumulated a better understanding of their business too and knew they could push their profits up by keeping the supply of the most favored bulbs low.
By 1730 hyacinth prices had reached substantial levels, much to the delight of the florists. The Voorhelm bulb gardens, run now by Pieter’s grandson Joris, remained at the forefront of the trade, but other Haarlem growers also made fortunes from hyacinths. Prices peaked between 1733 and 1736 before falling away steeply in 1737. The reason for the plunge was the same that it had been in 1637: Prices had reached such high levels that the most desirable bulbs became all but unobtainable, and less fancied varieties appreciated to the point where they cost far more than they were worth to any real flower lover. Bulb catalogs published two years after the mania’s peak show that valuable doubles such as the white Staaten Generaal, which had sold for 210 guilders, now fetched only 20; Miroir went from 141 guilders per bulb to 10, Red Granaats fell from 66 guilders to 16, and Gekroont Salomon’s Jewel from 80 all the way down to 3.
From these figures it can be seen that the prices obtained during the hyacinth craze were an order of magnitude less than those of the tulip craze. Staaten Generaal sold for around two hundred guilders, where an Admirael van der Eijck might have fetched nearly two thousand, and the highest prices recorded for double hyacinths, at about sixteen hundred guilders per bulb, were at best only a third as much as the most coveted tulips had fetched a century before. In addition, individual speculators appear to have been a little more cautious than their forebears. The one significant innovation of the hyacinth craze was the practice of buying shares in particularly valuable bulbs, a practice that does not seem to have occurred during the tulip mania. It must have been a frustrating business, in that the shareholders would have to wait a year or more for their flower to produce offsets before they could expect to receive a single bulb of their own, but it was at least a cheap way of buying into hyacinths; one lengthy Dutch poem, Flora’s Bloemwarande, which described the new trade, mentions a florist named Jan Bolt, who sold a half-share in one of his bulbs to a hesitant customer, with only 10 percent down.
There were several reasons why the hyacinth trade never matched the tulip mania in magnitude. To begin with, hyacinths are much more difficult to grow than hardy mountain flowers such as tulips, which limited the number of garden lovers interested in buying them. This in turn meant that demand remained at a lower level than it did during the years of tulip craze; hyacinths attracted much less attention than tulips had done, which kept the number of speculators attracted by the trade to a minimum. Most significantly of all, there is little evidence for any sort of futures trade in hyacinths; there are one or two mentions of bulbs being purchased and then sold to third parties, but nothing more.
Nevertheless, at least a few private enthusiasts in Haarlem and The Hague seem to have been sufficiently caught up in the hyacinth craze to attempt to grow the flowers themselves for profit, and at its peak there was considerable disapproval for the new craze. Memories of the tulip mania evidently remained vivid, for one enterprising publisher reprinted the three Samenspraecken of Gaergoedt