The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (11 page)

For good reason, the Dutch have never been content to accept nature as they found it. Lacking in conventional charms and variety, the landscape of the Low Countries is spectacularly flat, monotonous, and swampy. “An universall quagmire” is how one Englishman described the place; “the buttock of the world.” What beauty there is in the Netherlands is largely the result of human effort: the dikes and canals built to drain the land, the windmills erected to interrupt the unbroken sweep of wind across it. In his famous essay on tulipomania, “The Bitter Smell of Tulips,” the poet Zbigniew Herbert suggests that the “monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colorful, and unusual flora.”

Such dreams could be indulged as never before in seventeenth-century Holland, as Dutch traders and plant explorers returned home with a parade of exotic new plant species. Botany became a national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today. This was a nation, and a time, in which a botanical treatise could become a best-seller and a plantsman like Clusius a celebrity.

Land in Holland being so scarce and expensive, Dutch gardens were miniatures, measured in square feet rather than acres and frequently augmented with mirrors. The Dutch thought of their gardens as jewel boxes, and in such a space even a single flower—and especially one as erect, singular, and strikingly colored as a tulip—could make a powerful statement.

To make such statements—about one’s sophistication, about one’s wealth—has always been one of the reasons people plant gardens. In the seventeenth century the Dutch were the richest people in Europe and, as the historian Simon Schama shows in
The Embarrassment of Riches,
their Calvinist faith did not keep them from indulging in the pleasures of conspicuous display. The exoticism and expense of tulips certainly recommended them for this purpose, but so did the fact that, among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless. Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were sources of medicine, perfume, or even food. In the West flowers have often come under attack from various Puritans, and what has always saved them has been their practical uses. It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them.

When the tulip first arrived in Europe, people set about fashioning some utilitarian purpose for it. The Germans boiled and sugared the bulbs and, unconvincingly, declared them a delicacy; the English tried serving them up with oil and vinegar. Pharmacists proposed the tulip as a remedy for flatulence. None of these uses caught on, however. “The tulip remained itself,” Herbert writes, “the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.” The tulip was a thing of beauty, no more, no less.

If the tulip’s useless beauty suited the Dutch taste for display, it also meshed with the age’s humanism, which was striving to put some breathing space between art and religion. Unlike the rose or the lily, say, the tulip had not yet been enlisted as a Christian symbol (though tulipomania would eventually change that); to paint a vase of tulips was to delve into the wonders of nature rather than into the storehouse of iconography.

I also think the particular character of the tulip’s beauty made it a good match for the Dutch temperament. Generally bereft of scent, the tulip is the coolest of floral characters. In fact, the Dutch counted the tulip’s lack of scent as a virtue, a proof of the flower’s chasteness and moderation. Petals curving inward to hide its sexual organs, the tulip is an introvert among flowers. It is also somewhat aloof—one bloom per stem, one stem per plant. “The tulip allows us to admire it,” Herbert observes, “but does not awaken violent emotions, desire, jealousy or erotic fevers.”

None of these qualities would seem to portend the frenzy to come. But as it would happen, the outward composure of Dutchman and tulip alike held sleeping within it something else.

• • •

One crucial element of the beauty of the tulip that intoxicated the Dutch, the Turks, the French, and the English has been lost to us. To them the tulip was a magic flower because it was prone to spontaneous and brilliant eruptions of color. In a planting of a hundred tulips, one of them might be so possessed, opening to reveal the white or yellow ground of its petals painted, as if by the finest brush and steadiest hand, with intricate feathers or flames of a vividly contrasting hue. When this happened, the tulip was said to have “broken,” and if a tulip broke in a particularly striking manner—if the flames of the applied color reached clear to the petal’s lip, say, and its pigment was brilliant and pure and its pattern symmetrical—the owner of that bulb had won the lottery. For the offsets of that bulb would inherit its pattern and hues and command a fantastic price. The fact that broken tulips for some unknown reason produced fewer and smaller offsets than ordinary tulips drove their prices still higher. Semper Augustus was the most famous such break.

The closest we have to a broken tulip today is the group known as the Rembrandts—so named because Rembrandt painted some of the most admired breaks of his time. But these latter-day tulips, with their heavy patterning of one or more contrasting colors, look clumsy by comparison, as if painted in haste with a thick brush. To judge from the paintings we have of the originals, the petals of broken tulips could be as fine and intricate as marbleized papers, the extravagant swirls of color somehow managing to seem both bold and delicate at once. In the most striking examples—such as the fiery carmine that Semper Augustus splashed on its pure white ground—the outbreak of color juxtaposed with the orderly, linear form of the tulip could be breathtaking, with the leaping, wayward patterns just barely contained by the petal’s edge.

Anna Pavord recounts the extraordinary lengths to which Dutch growers would go to make their tulips break, sometimes borrowing their techniques from alchemists, who faced what must have seemed a comparable challenge. Over the earth above a bed planted with white tulips, gardeners would liberally sprinkle paint powders of the desired hue, on the theory that rainwater would wash the color down to the roots, where it would be taken up by the bulb. Charlatans sold recipes believed to produce the magic color breaks; pigeon droppings were thought to be an effective agent, as was plaster dust taken from the walls of old houses. Unlike the alchemists, whose attempts to change base metals into gold reliably failed, now and then the would-be tulip changers would be rewarded with a good break, inspiring everybody to redouble their efforts.

What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert—a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through. It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by
Myzus persicae,
the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens.

By the 1920s the Dutch regarded their tulips as commodities to trade rather than jewels to display, and since the virus weakened the bulbs it infected (the reason the offsets of broken tulips were so small and few in number), Dutch growers set about ridding their fields of the infection. Color breaks, when they did occur, were promptly destroyed, and a certain peculiar manifestation of natural beauty abruptly lost its claim on human affection.

I can’t help thinking that the virus was supplying something the tulip needed, just the touch of abandon the flower’s chilly formality called for. Maybe that’s why the broken tulip became such a treasure in seventeenth-century Holland: the wayward color loosed on a tulip by a good break perfected the flower, even as the virus responsible set about destroying it.

• • •

On its face the story of the virus and the tulip would seem to throw a wrench into any evolutionary understanding of beauty. What possible good could it do a flower for an infection that decreases its fitness to enhance its appeal to people? I suppose a case could be made that the virus, by adding fuel to the frenzy of tulipomania, led to the planting of many more tulips in the hope of finding more breaks. But the fact remains that, because of people’s idiosyncratic notion of tulip beauty, for several hundred years tulips were selected for a trait that would sicken and eventually kill them.

This would seem to represent a perversion of natural selection, a violation of the laws of nature. And so it is—considered from the vantage point of the tulip. But what if the question is considered instead from the vantage point of the virus? The rule of law is restored. What the virus did was to insinuate itself into the relationship between people and flowers, in effect exploiting human ideas of tulip beauty in order to advance its own selfish purposes. (Which, if you think about it, is not so different from what humans did when they elbowed into the old relationship of bees and flowers.) The more beautiful the breaks produced by the infection, the greater the number of infected plants in Dutch gardens and the more total virus in circulation. What a trick! As a survival strategy, the virus’s scheme was brilliant, at least as long as people didn’t figure out what was going on. For where else in nature has a disease rendered a living thing more lovely? And not just lovely, but lovely in a previously unimagined way, for the virus created an entirely new way for a tulip to be beautiful, at least in our eyes. The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.

• • •

The transformation of the tulip from a jewel-box flower to a (virus-free) commodity has made the tulip oddly hard to see. Massed in the landscape, tulips register on us mostly as instances of pure color; they could almost be lollipops or lipsticks in the landscape. At least this is how they used to register on me—as eye candy, pleasurable enough but weightless. I am not by nature a great noticer, and for all the years between the time when my parents paid me to plant tulips in our yard and the spring of this writing, the beauty of tulips—their specific beauty—was lost on me. But I don’t think the problem is unique to me.

“Beauty always takes place in the particular,” the critic Elaine Scarry has written, “and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.” In a sense, particular tulips are hard to come by—because they are so cheap and ubiquitous, that’s partly why, but also because their form and color are, more than those of most flowers, peculiarly abstract. Far more than a rose, say, or a peony, an actual, specific tulip closely resembles our preconceived idea of a tulip. By now the tulip’s parabolic curves are as deeply etched into consciousness as a Coke bottle’s; with a fidelity that is remarkable (and that is far more typical of a commodity than a thing in nature), the tulips one meets in the world match the tulips resident in one’s head. In color, too, tulips are so uniform and faithful (like paint chips) to whatever shade they profess to be that we quickly take it in—this
idea
of yellow or red or white—and then move on to consume the next visual treat. Tulips are so tuliplike, so platonically themselves, that they skate past our regard like models on a runway.

• • •

One way to begin to slow down and recover the particular beauty of a tulip, I discovered this spring, is to bring one indoors and look at it individually. This, I think, may be even more helpful than planting older or more exotic varieties, for I suspect that even some of the Triumphs and Darwins sold in the mass-market mesh bags would, if cut and brought indoors and then really looked at, also hold the power to astonish. It is no accident that botanical illustrators and photographers have so often brought their scrupulous eye to bear on this particular flower: it rewards that particular gaze like no other.

I eventually want to bring that gaze briefly to bear on a single tulip—the Queen of Night sitting before me on my desk this late-May morning. Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.

This particular effect was prized by the Dutch, and the quest for a truly black tulip—a quest that has gone on for at least four hundred years and goes on still—became one of the more intriguing subplots of tulipomania. Alexandre Dumas
père
wrote a whole novel—
The Black Tulip
—about a competition in seventeenth-century Holland to grow the first truly black tulip; the greed and intrigue inspired by the contest (in the novel the Horticultural Society had put up a prize of 100,000 guilders) destroyed three lives. By the time the “miraculous tulip” appears, Cornelius, the man who bred it, is in jail, wrongly imprisoned on a tip by his neighbor, who has claimed the prize flower as his own. Cornelius glimpses the culmination of his life’s work through the bars of his cell: “The tulip was beautiful, splendid, magnificent; its stem was more than eighteen inches high. It rose from out of four green leaves, which were as smooth and straight as iron lance heads; the whole of the flower was as black and shining as jet.”

But why a
black
tulip? Perhaps because the color black is so rare in nature (or at least, in living nature), and tulipomania was nothing if not a vast and precarious edifice poised on the finest points of botanical rarity. Black also carries connotations of evil, and the mania would later come to be seen as a morality tale about worldly temptation, in which a whole people succumbed, ruinously, to not one but an entire bouquet of deadly sins. At the same time, black, like white, is a blankness onto which any and all desire (or fear) may be projected. For Dumas the black tulip was a synecdoche for tulipomania itself, an indifferent and arbitrary mirror in which a perverse consensus of meaning and value came briefly and disastrously into focus.