The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (13 page)

As with society, so with capitalism in the throes of a speculative mania: all of its values are turned on their head—thrift, patience, value for money, reward for effort. For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed, or rather recast along new lines, ones that will appear absurd in the cold light of the morning after but that make impeccable sense within the fevered space of the speculative bubble.

It’s hard to date with precision exactly when the bubble in Holland formed, but the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That’s when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price. Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground, and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers. Now began the
windhandel
—the wind trade.

Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair, and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted “florists” who couldn’t have cared less. These men were speculators who, only days before, had been carpenters and weavers, woodcutters and glassblowers, smiths, cobblers, coffee grinders, farmers, tradesmen, peddlers, clergymen, schoolmasters, lawyers, and apothecaries. One burglar in Amsterdam pawned the tools of his trade so that he too could become a speculator in tulips.

Rushing to get in on the sure thing, these people sold their businesses, mortgaged their homes, and invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers. Predictably, the flood of fresh capital into the market drove prices to bracing new heights. In the space of a month the price of a red-and-yellow-striped Gheel ende Root van Leyden leapt from 46 guilders to 515. A bulb of Switsers, a yellow tulip feathered with red, soared from 60 to 1,800 guilders.

At its height, the trade in tulips was conducted by florists in “colleges”—back rooms of taverns given over to the new business two or three days a week. Colleges quickly developed a set of rituals that sound like a cross between orderly stock market protocol and a drinking contest. Under one common set of procedures, called
met de borden,
or “with the boards,” a seller and buyer who wanted to do business were handed slates on which they wrote an opening price for the tulip in question. The slates were then passed to a pair of proxies (essentially arbitrators nominated by the traders), who would then settle on a price somewhere between the two opening bids; this they would scribble on the slates before passing them back to the principals. The traders could either let the number stand, signifying agreement, or rub it out. If both rubbed out the price, the deal was off; but if only one party declined, that florist had to pay a fine to the college—an incentive to close the deal. When a deal did close, the buyer had to pay a small commission, called the
wijnkoopsgeld:
wine money. In keeping with the carnival atmosphere, these fines and commissions were used to buy wine and beer for everyone—another incentive to make deals. In a satirical pamphlet describing the scene, an old-timer advises his neophyte friend to drink up: “This trade must be done with an intoxicated head, and the bolder one is, the better.”

• • •

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world. By 1636 the taverns were crowded with such people, and as long as Holland remained home to an expanding population of greater fools—people blinded by their desire for instant wealth—the truly foolish act would have been to abstain from the tulip trade.
*

Even so, there was more to the
windhandel
than mere wind. For the tulip craze marked the birth of a real business—the Dutch bulb trade—that would long outlast the mania. (The same could be said of our own Internet bubble: beneath the froth of speculation is a new and important industry.) According to Joseph Schumpeter, it is not at all unusual for the birth of a new business to be attended by a speculative bubble as capital rushes in, dazzled by the young industry’s wildly exaggerated promise.

Every bubble sooner or later must burst—the carnival that was permanent would spell the end of the social order. In Holland the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled—real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs—and the market grew jittery.

On February 2, 1637, the florists of Haarlem gathered as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin the bidding at 1,250 guilders for a quantity of tulips—Switsers, in one account. Finding no takers, he tried again at 1,100, then 1,000 . . . and all at once every man in the room—men who days before had themselves paid comparable sums for comparable tulips—understood that the weather had changed. Haarlem was the capital of the bulb trade, and the news that there were no buy-ers to be found there ricocheted across the country. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price. In all of Holland a greater fool was no longer to be found.

In the aftermath, many Dutch blamed the flower for their folly, as if the tulips themselves had, like the sirens, lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin. Broadsides excoriating the tulipomania became best-sellers:
The Fall of the Great Garden-Whore, the Villain-Goddess Flora; Flora’s Fool’s Cap, or Scenes from the Remarkable Year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their wealth and the Wise lost their senses; Charge Against the Pagan and Turkish Tulip-Bulbs.
(Flora was, of course, the Roman goddess of flowers, who was a prostitute famous for bankrupting her lovers.) In the months after the fever broke, a professor of botany at the University of Leiden, a man named Fortius who occupied Clusius’s old chair, could be seen patrolling the streets of the city, beating any tulip he encountered with his cane. At the conclusion of a medieval carnival, it was the carnival king who was hung in effigy. Likewise, the ancient festivals of Dionysus would end in destruction and mutilation and the sacrifice of the god himself.

• • •

It bears remembering that tulipomania was finally a frenzy not of consumption or of pleasure but of financial speculation, and that it took place not in a country ordinarily given to large passions but rather in the most stolid bourgeois culture of the time. The Dionysian eruptions of the tulip are relative, in other words, making an impression in direct proportion to their anomalousness.

Certainly the color break I spotted in Grand Army Plaza was like that—a wayward splatter of paint on a monochromatic ground, an extravagance I might not have noticed if not for the scrupulous precinct of order—of petal, of blossom, of plant—in which it happened to detonate. Etymologically, the word
extravagant
means to wander off a path or cross a line—orderly lines, of course, being Apollo’s special domain. In this may lie a clue to the abiding power of the tulip, as well as, perhaps, to the nature of beauty. The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature and then, in spasms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them. On the same principle, syncopation enlivens a regular, four-four measure of music, enjambment the stately line of iambic pentameter. So here is a third constituent of beauty to add to the desiderata offered to us by the flower: first came contrast, then pattern (or form), and finally variation.

The pleasure we take in the breaking of a too-predictable pattern may account for the allure of the broken tulip, as well as the Rembrandt and the parrot (a type of tulip that explodes the tailored flower into the exuberant frills of a party dress). Then, of course, there is the black tulip, the gothic femme fatale in the masculine world of tulips. In the Queen of Night the mysteriously depthless hue plays against the sunny lucidity of her form. Our eyes and ears quickly tire of any strict Apollonian order that isn’t shadowed by some hint, some threat, of trespass or waywardness.

By the same token, the most breathtaking rose or peony is the one in which the tumbling profusion of its petals is held in check by some kind of form or frame; the slightest suggestion of symmetry—the form of a globe or teacup, say—keeps the bloom from going slack. The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies, which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two gods of art. Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together. One tendency uninformed by the other can bring forth only coldness or chaos—the stiffness of a Triumph tulip, the slackness of a wild rose. So though we can classify any particular flower as Apollonian or Dionysian (or male or female) the most beautiful flowers—like Semper Augustus or Queen of Night—are the ones that also partake of their opposing element.

The Greeks’ myth of beauty, the most persuasive I know of, takes us most of, but not all, the way back to beauty’s origins in the commingling of tendencies found in the human brain and breast. But the birth of beauty goes back further still, to a time before Apollo and Dionysus, before human desire, when the world was mostly leaf and the first flower opened.

• • •

Once upon a time, there were no flowers—two hundred million years ago, to be only slightly more precise. There were plants then, of course, ferns and mosses, conifers and cycads, but these plants didn’t form true flowers or fruit. Some of them reproduced asexually, cloning themselves by various means. Sexual reproduction was a relatively discreet affair usually accomplished by releasing pollen onto the wind or water; by sheer chance some of it would find its way to other members of the species, and a tiny, primitive seed would result. This prefloriferous world was a slower, simpler, sleepier world than our own. Evolution proceeded more slowly, there being so much less sex, and what sex there was took place among close-by and closely related plants. Such a conservative approach to reproduction made for a biologically simpler world, since it generated relatively little novelty or variation. Life on the whole was more local and inbred.

The world before flowers was sleepier than ours because, lacking fruit and large seeds, it couldn’t support many warm-blooded creatures. Reptiles ruled, and life slowed to a crawl whenever it got cold; little happened at night. It was a plainer-looking world, too, greener even than it is now, absent all the colors and patterns (not to mention scents) that flowers and fruits would bring into it. Beauty did not yet exist. That is, the way things looked had nothing to do with desire.

Flowers changed everything. The angiosperms, as botanists call the plants that form flowers and then encased seeds, appeared during the Cretaceous period, and they spread over the earth with stunning rapidity. “An abominable mystery” is how Charles Darwin described this sudden and entirely evitable event. Now, instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand coevolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation. With the advent of the flower, whole new levels of complexity come into the world: more interdependence, more information, more communication, more experimentation.

The evolution of plants proceeded according to a new motive force: attraction between different species. Now natural selection favored blooms that could rivet the attention of pollinators, fruits that appealed to foragers. The desires of other creatures became paramount in the evolution of plants, for the simple reason that the plants that succeeded at gratifying those desires wound up with more offspring. Beauty had emerged as a survival strategy.

The new rules speeded the rate of evolutionary change. Bigger, brighter, sweeter, more fragrant: all these qualities were quickly rewarded under the new regime. But so was specialization. Since bestowing one’s pollen on an insect that might deliver it to the wrong address (such as the blossoms of unrelated species) was wasteful, it became an advantage to look and smell as distinctive as possible, the better to command the undivided attention of a single, dedicated pollinator. Animal desire was thus parsed and subdivided, plants specialized accordingly, and an extraordinary flowering of diversity took place, much of it under the signs of coevolution and beauty.

With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

• • •

So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time human desire entered into the natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes. Now came roses that resembled aroused nymphs, tulip petals in the shape of daggers, peonies bearing the scent of women. We in turn did our part, multiplying the flowers beyond reason, moving their seeds around the planet, writing books to spread their fame and ensure their happiness. For the flower it was the same old story, another grand coevolutionary bargain with a willing, slightly credulous animal—a good deal on the whole, though not nearly as good as the earlier bargain with the bees.

And what about us? How did we make out? We did very well by the flower. There were, of course, the pleasures to the senses, the sustenance of their fruit and seeds, and the vast store of new metaphor. But we gazed even farther into the blossom of a flower and found something more: the crucible of beauty, if not art, and maybe even a glimpse into the meaning of life. For look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature’s double nature—that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence
and
necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?