The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (12 page)

A second story is told, this one possibly true, about a black tulip discovered by a poor shoemaker at the height of the madness. In the version that Zbigniew Herbert tells, five gentlemen from the union of florists in Haarlem, all dressed in black, pay a visit to the shoemaker, professing to do him a good turn by offering to buy his tulip bulb. The shoemaker, sensing their avarice, begins to bargain in earnest, and after much haggling the two parties settle on a price for the bulb: 1,500 florins, a sum that to the shoemaker is a windfall. The bulb changes hands.

“Now something unexpected happened,” Herbert writes, “something that in drama is called a turning point.” The florists throw the precious bulb to the ground and stomp it to a pulp.

“ ‘You idiot!’ they shouted at the stupefied shoe patcher, ‘we also have a bulb of the black tulip. Besides us, no one else in the world! No king, no emperor or sultan. If you had asked ten thousand florins for your bulb and a couple of horses on top of it, we would have paid without a word. And remember this. Good fortune won’t smile on you a second time in your entire life, because you are a blockhead.’ ” The shoemaker, devastated, staggers to his bed in the attic and dies.

Herbert’s view of the tulipomania is itself unremittingly black. To him the Dutch frenzy had nothing whatever to do with beauty, only with the consuming evil of the fixed idea, a phenomenon that can, at any time, destroy the “sanctuaries of reason” on which civilization depends. Herbert’s tulipomania is a parable of utopianism, specifically of communism. It is true that, after a certain point, the flowers themselves became irrelevant—a time came when crushing a particular tulip bulb, or holding a paper “futures contract” for another still in the ground, conferred greater wealth than the most beautiful blossom ever beheld.

Still, it’s important to remember that what ended in Holland in madness had begun with the desire for beauty in a place where, it seemed to many, beauty was in comparatively short supply. This was also a country, remember, where everyone, regardless of social class, dressed remarkably alike, in the sartorial equivalent of a monotone. Color in this gray Calvinist land must have struck the eye with unimaginable force—and the color of tulips was like no color anyone had ever laid eyes on before: saturated, brilliant, more intense than that of any other flower.

The story of the Semper Augustus, the most celebrated and expensive tulip for most of the seventeenth century, is a reminder that beauty did in fact underwrite the mania—that, at least in Holland in the 1630s, pork bellies could never have substituted for tulips. The consensus was that Semper Augustus was the most beautiful flower in the world, a masterpiece. “The color is white, with Carmine on a blue base, and with an unbroken flame right to the top,” Nicolaes van Wassenaer wrote in 1624 after seeing the tulip in the garden of one Dr. Adriaen Pauw. “Never did a Florist see one more beautiful than this.” There were only a dozen or so specimens in existence—and Dr. Pauw owned nearly all of them. This passionate tulip fancier (who was a director of the new East India Company) grew them on his estate in Heemstede, near Haarlem, where he had deployed an elaborate mirrored gazebo in his garden to multiply the effect of his precious blooms. Through the 1620s, Dr. Pauw was bombarded with wildly escalating offers to sell his Semper Augustus bulbs, but he would not part with them at any price. That refusal—which at least one historian credits with igniting the mania—was grounded in the fact that, as Wassenaer tells us, this connoisseur judged the pleasure of looking at a Semper Augustus far superior to any profit.

Before the speculation came the looking.

• • •

Looking at my own black tulip, the Queen of Night, here on my desk, I can see it has the classic form of the single tulip: six petals arrayed in two tiers (three inner petals cupped inside three outer ones) that draw an oblong vault of space around the flower’s sexual parts, simultaneously advertising and sheltering them from view; each petal is at once a flag and a curtain, drawn. I see too that the petals are not identical: the inner petals have a small, delicate cleft at the top, while the sturdier outer ones form uninterrupted ovals, their incised edges as clean as a blade’s. The petals look soft and silky but are not: to the touch they’re unexpectedly hard, like orchid petals, and no more silky than this page. Together the six convex petals fit together to form a tailored, somewhat austere blossom; inviting neither touch nor smell, the flower asks me to admire it from a distance. The fact that Queen of Night has no detectable scent is fitting: this is an experience designed strictly for the delectation of the eye.

The long, curving stem of my Queen of Night is nearly as beautiful as the flower it supports. It is graceful, but graceful in a specifically masculine way. This is not the grace of a woman’s neck as much as that of a stone sculpture or the curving steel cables of a suspension bridge. The curve seems economical, purposeful, inevitable in its structural logic, even as it changes over time. A horticulturally inclined mathematician would no doubt be able to represent the stem of my tulip in a differential equation.

As the day warms, the curve of the stem relaxes and the petals pull back to reveal the flower’s interior space and organs. Like everything else about the tulip, these, too, are explicit and logical. Six stamens—one for every petal—circle around a sturdy upright pedestal, each of them extending, like trembling suitors, a powdery yellow bouquet. Crowning the central pedestal, which botanists call a “style,” is the stigma, a pursed set of slightly crooked lips (typically three) poised to receive the grains of pollen, conducting them downward toward the flower’s ovary. Sometimes, as now, a single glistening droplet of liquid (nectar? dew?) appears on the stigma’s lip, a suggestion of receptiveness.

Everything about tulip sex seems orderly and intelligible; there is none of the occult mystery that attends the sexuality of, say, a Bourbon rose or a doubled peony. Those two are flowers in which one imagines a bumblebee being forced to feel his way around in the dark, stumbling blindly, drunkenly, getting himself all tangled in their innumerable petals. Which is precisely the idea, of course. But it is not the tulip’s idea.

In this, I think, lies the key to the distinctive personality of the tulip, if not to the nature of floral beauty in general. Compared to the other canonical flowers, the beauty of the tulip is classical rather than romantic. Or, to borrow the useful dichotomy drawn by the Greeks, the tulip is that rare figure of Apollonian beauty in a horticultural pantheon mainly presided over by Dionysus.

Certainly the rose and peony are Dionysian flowers, deeply sensual and captivating us as much through the senses of touch and smell as sight. The entirely unreasonable multiplication of their petals (one Chinese tree peony is said to have more than three hundred) defies clear seeing and good sense; the profusion of folds edges toward a gorgeous, intoxicating incoherence. To lean in and inhale the breath of a rose or peony is momentarily to leave our rational selves behind, to be transported as only a haunting fragrance can transport us. This is what is meant by ecstasy: to be taken out of ourselves. Such flowers propose a dream of abandon instead of form.

The tulip, by contrast, is all Apollonian clarity and order. It’s a linear, left-brained sort of flower, in no way occult, explicit and logical in its formal rules and arrangements (six petals corresponding to six stamens), and conveying all this rationality the only way conceivable: through the eye. The clean, steely stem holds the solitary flower up in the air for our admiration, positing its lucid form over and above the uncertain, shifting earth. The tulip’s blooms float above nature’s turmoil; even when they expire they do so gracefully. Instead of turning to mush, like a spent rose, or to used Kleenex, like peony petals, the six petals on a tulip cleanly, dryly, and, often simultaneously, shatter.

Friedrich Nietzsche described Apollo, in contrast to Dionysus, as “the god of individuation and just boundaries.” Unlike the great mass of flowers, a tulip bloom stands as an individual in the landscape or vase: one bloom per plant, each one perched atop its stem very much like a head. (Recall that the word
tulip
comes from the Turkish word for “turban.”) Lower down the figure come the elongated leaves, precisely two in most botanical renderings, often deployed like limbs. It’s no surprise that the tulip was the first flower to have its cultivars individually named—and named for individuals.

But unlike most other flowers, which bear female or feminine names, the nomenclature of tulips (Queen of Night notwithstanding) is rife with the names of great men, especially generals and admirals. In the Greek mind the Dionysian was most often associated with the female principle (or at least with androgyny), the Apollonian with the male. Similarly, the Chinese divided flowers, like everything else, into (female) yin and (male) yang. In Chinese thought the soft and extravagantly petaled peony blossom represents the very essence of yin (though its more linear stems and roots are deemed to be yang). Biologically speaking, most flowers (including tulips) are bisexual, containing both male and female organs, yet in our imaginations they tend to lean one way or the other, their forms recalling masculine or feminine beauty and sometimes even male or female organs. There’s a rose in my garden, blowsily doubled and colored the palest pink, that the French call Cuisse de Nymph Emue—it was not enough, apparently, to liken this seductive bloom to the “thigh of a nymph,” so it became “thigh of an aroused nymph.” You can walk through any garden and choose up sides: boy, girl, boy, girl, girl, girl. . . . The canonical flowers seem to me almost all female—except, that is, for the tulip, perhaps the most masculine of flowers. If you doubt this, watch next April how a tulip forces its head up out of the ground, how the head gradually colors as it rises. Dig down along the shaft, and you’ll find its bulb, smooth, rounded, hard as a nut, a form for which the botanists offer a most graphic term: “testiculate.”

• • •

Of course, like all of our (Apollonian) efforts to order and categorize nature, this one goes only so far before the (Dionysian) pull of things as they really are begins to take its inevitable toll. I mentioned the orderly arrangement of petals and stamens on the Queen of Night on my desk, yet when I went back to the garden to cut another (I have a completely unreasonable number of Queen of Nights in my garden), I noticed for the first time that the bed was teeming with subtle perversities. Here were Queen of Nights with nine and even ten petals, mutant stigmas with six lips instead of three, and in one case a leaf streaked with deep purple, as if its dull green had been infiltrated by the colored petals overhead, their pigment somehow seeping through the plant’s body like a dye or drug.

As anyone who grows a lot of them knows, tulips are prone to such eruptions of biological irrationality—chance mutations, color breaks, and instances of “thievery.” Thievery is the tulip grower’s term for a mysterious phenomenon that causes certain flowers in a field to revert to the form and color of their parent. What I saw in my bed of Nights was an instance of the wondrous instability that inspired the belief that nature liked to play with tulips more than with any other flower.

• • •

A few weeks ago I passed through Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, where a large flower bed off Fifth Avenue had been planted with thousands of fat yellow Triumphs, arranged with dulling parade-ground precision. They were exactly the sort of stiff, primary-color tulips I used to plant in my parents’ yard. I’d read that even today, at a time when tulip growers struggle mightily to keep their fields free of the virus that causes the flower to break, it still occasionally happens. And there in the middle of that relentless, monotonous bed, I spotted one: a violent eruption of red on a chaste canary petal. It wasn’t the most handsome of breaks, but the flare of carmine leaping up from the base of that one bloom stood out in the grid of conformists like an exuberant clown, pulling the rug out from under the dream of order this flower bed was meant to represent.

And there was something thrilling about it—I could hardly believe my luck. To me that careless splash of red seemed almost like a visitation—of the distant tulip past, yes, for here was the return of the virus so assiduously repressed, but of something else, too, some inchoate, underground force that riveted me. It was as if the whole grid of flowers and, by extension, the grid of the city itself had been put in doubt by that one ecstatic, wayward pulse of life. (Or was it death? I guess you’d have to say it was both.)

Then, that night, I dreamt about what I’d witnessed, the stiff yellow grid and its solitary red joker. In the dream version the broken tulip appears in the front row, and right beside it lies a fancy fountain pen, a Montblanc. (This is all too embarrassing to make up.) In a gesture of impetuousness completely out of character, I grab them both, the broken tulip and the pen, and run like a man possessed up Fifth Avenue. I’m flying by the spinning doors of the Plaza and Pierre hotels when I snag the attention of the two brass-buttoned doormen standing sentry outside the Pierre. They can have no idea who I am or what I’ve done, but they leap to and give slapstick chase anyway, their cartoon hollerings—“Stop! Thief!”—sounding in my ears as I tear up the avenue, clutching my tulip and pen and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of it all—the circumstance, but also the dream about it.

• • •

Color breaks far more beautiful than the one I saw on Fifth Avenue had helped fire the tulipomania, a speculative frenzy that, like the breaks themselves, can perhaps best be understood as an explosive outbreak of the Dionysian in the too-strict Apollonian world of the tulip—and of the Dutch bourgeoisie. This, at least, is how I’ve come to think of the tulipomania—as a festival of Dionysus, by turns ecstatic and destructive, transplanted from the forest or temple to the orderly precincts of the marketplace.

Tulipomania bore all the hallmarks of a medieval carnival, in which, for a brief “orgasmic interim” (in the words of the French historian Le Roy Ladurie), the stable order of society was turned on its head. A carnival is a social ritual of sanctioned craziness and release—a way for a community to temporarily indulge its Dionysian urges. For its duration, the identity of everyone swept into its vortex is up for grabs: the village idiot is made king, the poor man suddenly rich, the rich man just as suddenly a pauper. Everyday roles and values are suddenly, thrillingly, suspended, and astounding new possibilities arise.