Tulipomania (29 page)

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 beautiful that one dealer, Egbert van der Vaert, used to boast that if Zeus had only known of his latest acquisition, he would have taken on the form of that hyacinth, rather than a swan, when he descended from Olympus to seduce Leda.

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 and Waermondt, prefacing the dialogues with the comment that the present-day speculators were just as greedy as their ancestors and just as taken in by tawdry deceits of that wily old whore Flora. Others produced new tracts warning against the excesses of the hyacinth trade. With the awful lessons of the tulip mania so fresh in every mind, it might be said that the most remarkable thing about the new craze was that it occurred at all.

The story of the tulip can be brought up to the present day in a very few words. The trade has continued to be dominated and driven forward by Dutch growers. Indeed, for much of the eighteenth century
a single group of a dozen Haarlem florists effectively controlled the entire business. Even when their oligopoly was broken during the Napoleonic Wars, the reputation of Dutch farmers remained unparalleled, and as more and more people took up gardening as a hobby and worldwide demand for flowers of all sorts soared, the area around Haarlem given over to the cultivation of bulbs increased too. First farms appeared in Bloemendaal and Overveen, just to the west of the city; then cultivation expanded south toward Hillegom and Lisse on land made available by the draining of the Haarlemmermeer in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was around this time that individual bulb farms expanded in size too, creating the first of the huge tulip fields that have become one of the most popular picture-postcard images of Holland. Next—with almost all the fertile land around Haarlem given over to flowers—a portion of the bulb trade moved away from the city altogether. Today more tulips are produced by the farms of North Holland than come from Haarlem.

There have been other fundamental changes too. Bulb growers have now mastered the techniques necessary to produce tulips all year round. By keeping bulbs at low temperatures in a state of suspended animation, it is now possible to have them flower as desired. The long wait for the next tulip time, which frustrated flower lovers for centuries, no longer exists, and with it has vanished the single most essential precondition of the tulip mania.

Most fundamentally of all, the tulip itself has changed. In the 250 years that have passed since the mania subsided, Dutch farmers have introduced several radically different species to gardens, from parrot tulips, with their twisted leaves and big, beak-tipped petals, to double tulips, with their extra complement of petals, to Darwins—hybrid giants first bred in the nineteenth century. The broken tulips that once achieved such fame, on the other hand, no longer exist. Weakened as they were by the mosaic virus, the original species—including
even famed varieties such as Viceroy and Semper Augustus—were in any case doomed to flourish for only a short time, but even their successors are long gone now; for years the only flared and flamed tulips available to gardeners have been imitations produced by careful cross-breeding.

The bulb industry views the destruction of the mosaic virus as one of its proudest achievements, and with good reason. It is the florists’ equivalent of the elimination of smallpox. Yet it can hardly be denied that something has been lost in the winning of this war. The infinite variety that each broken tulip could display is gone, and with it much of the flower’s capacity to fascinate and astound.

Today the bulb trade offers not variety but varieties: a huge and ever-growing array of different tulips. The flower lover of Clusius’s day had only a handful of species to enjoy, but now close to six thousand different tulips have been bred, described, and cataloged.

This dazzling array of choice is certainly impressive in itself; yet it unarguably lessens the importance of individual flowers. The modern fashion for expanses of uniform and unicolored tulips would certainly strike the seventeenth-century connoisseur, with his exemplars planted in their own small beds, as rather vulgar; and surely no modern gardener studies his flowers with the intensity of an old-time tulipophile, or knows each one so well.

As for tulip mania—well, that is one virus that has never disappeared. It always was a purely human disease, one that fed on the complementary human emotions of appreciation of beauty and greed for money, and it still breaks out occasionally. There was, for example, a craze for dahlias in France around 1838. Like the tulip two centuries before, this flower was a relative newcomer to Europe, having been introduced from Mexico around 1790. It was soon taken up by horticulturists, who bred numerous new varieties, and the beauty of the new cultivated flowers won widespread acclaim; they were
cited to disprove Rousseau’s contention that in the hands of man everything degenerates. For a short while dahlias fetched high prices; a bed of the flowers is said to have changed hands for seventy thousand francs,
*
and a single dahlia was exchanged for a fine diamond. Then fashions changed and the dahlia, like the tulip, faded from the history books. In 1912 it was the turn of Dutch gladioli to enjoy a very similar—but equally short-lived—boom.

The most recent manifestation of the old virus occurred as recently as 1985, when a mania broke out in China that followed the template of the tulip craze almost exactly. In this case speculation centered on yet another bulbous flower, the
jun zi lan
plant, or
Lycoris radiata
—the red spider lily. This lily grows small, funnel-shaped flowers that coil together like a tangled skein of wool. Tremendously long, curved stamens project far beyond the leaves to give the plant a delicious air of delicacy. The spider lily originated in Africa but came to China in the 1930s and was cultivated extensively in the Manchurian city of Ch’ang-ch’un. It was at first a favorite of the old ruling classes of the city, and for a while it was a mark of distinction for a patrician family to grow several different varieties of
jun zi lan
. The Communist takeover put a stop to the small market for bulbs that had evolved by the end of the 1940s, but the spider lily remained very popular and was eventually designated the official flower of Ch’ang-ch’un. By 1980 it was estimated that half of all the families in the city grew it.

A
jun zi lan
mania broke out in earnest only a few years later, when the Chinese government allowed a few modest economic reforms. The situation in Ch’ang-ch’un was then quite similar to that in Holland during the 1630s. Entrepreneurial activity was encouraged, but while there was plenty of desire to make money and an abundance of energy to tap, there were very few opportunities to invest
any surplus cash. In these circumstances, the spider lily growers of the city took advantage of the growing demand for their flowers from neighboring regions, and as prices began their inevitable rise,
*
speculation in
jun zi lan
bulbs followed right behind.

In 1981 or 1982, spider lily bulbs were selling for 100 yuan, about $20. This was already a substantial sum, given the low annual salaries prevalent in China. But by 1985 bulbs of the most coveted varieties are reported to have changed hands for the astronomical amount of 200,000 yuan, or about $50,000, an amount that puts even the sums paid at the height of the Dutch tulip craze to shame. Thus, while Semper Augustus at its peak might have commanded between five and ten thousand guilders a bulb, which was four to eight times the income of a well-off merchant, the highest prices quoted during the
jun zi lan
mania were equivalent to no less than three hundred times the annual earnings of the typical Chinese university graduate—quite a staggering sum.

In such circumstances it is unsurprising that the spider lily craze was short-lived even by the standards of flower manias. It collapsed in the summer of 1985, apparently because confidence in the fledgling trade had been undermined by a series of critical newspaper articles that described the speculation in bulbs as madness. The whole lily bulb market was quickly flooded with panicked dealers desperate to sell, and bulb prices fell sharply. Just as the Chinese boom had exceeded even the heights attained during the tulip years, so the crash, when it came, was still more severe. By the time the market for spider lilies stabilized at last, prices had plunged by anything up to 99 percent.