Tulipomania
Yes, it was real. (The Bus 5.8)
Welcome aboard The Bus!
THURSDAY ARCHIVE EDITION - FIRST PUBLISHED (1.6) 25 APRIL 2022
The Stop
From about 1634 to 1637, a craze for tulips swept through Holland. Almost overnight, the demand for certain bulbs grew and the corresponding prices rose to astronomical levels; at one point a single bulb could cost as much as a cow, a parcel of land, or even an entire house. Tulipomania is the name given to this event - a term which, since its conclusion in the early 17th Century, has never needed to be used again.1
The tulip craze had a simple beginning. In 1593, Carolus Clusius (former Director of the Imperial Botanical Garden in Vienna) moved to Leiden to establish a new physic garden,2 taking some bulbs with him. Though at the time there were a few tulips in at least one garden in Leiden, Clusius’s were uniquely beautiful - and he was unwilling to sell them at any price. In fact, Clusius was so ‘ostentatiously possessive of his rare flowers that he made the Dutch covet them, with disastrous results for his collection.’ As is often the way with desired rarities, thieves broke into his garden, stole the best of his plants and soon tulips began appearing all over the seventeen provinces of Holland - a country in which botany had become a ‘national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today.’3
In the 17th Century, the tulip4 appeared to be an almost magical flower as it was ‘prone to spontaneous and brilliant eruptions’ of colours. The most prized tulips were ones that had ‘broken’: in a planting of hundreds of flowers, one might open to expose the ‘white or yellow ground of its petals painted … with intricate feathers or flames of a vividly contrasting hue.’5 As the offsets of the broken tulip would inherit this same pattern - at a decreasing number for future offsets - if the break was uniquely striking, the owner of that bulb could become wealthy overnight.6 Soon, the very best flowers could be found in the often exotic gardens of the elite - with prices to match.7
The driving logic behind tulipomania is the ‘greater fool theory’: by any reasonable estimate paying thousands for a tulip bulb is ludicrous - but as long as there is an even greater fool willing to pay more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world. The precise date in which the tulip bubble began is unknown, but a definite ‘turning point’ came in the autumn of 1635 when ‘the trade in actual tulip bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing the details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price.’ As agricultural products subject to the seasons, the tulip business previously had involved physical flowers and bulbs - but overnight the flower became a year-round tradable commodity. The result was a ‘frenzy of … financial speculation’ creating an investment bubble that grew and grew until it popped on February 2, 1637. On this date, the market became ‘jittery’ because ‘real tulips [were] about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled [and] real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs.’ In other words, reality became … real. The tulip market suddenly crashed, the flowers and bulbs became unsellable at any price and many fortunes and lives were ruined.8
The Detour
Today’s Detour is an excerpt from Dark Mountain: Issue 21. A beautifully written essay, it will change what you think you know about Antarctica.
The Recommendation
Today’s book is connected to the Stop because to do otherwise seemed wrong. Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World concerns the intimate and highly complex relationships between humans and plants. In particular, Pollan focusses on four plants - each of which are related to a human desire: the apple (sweetness), the tulip (beauty), marijuana (intoxication) and the potato (control). Easy to read and packed full of fantastic information, I highly recommend this book.
The Sounds
Today’s playlist is a collection of five great tracks I’ve recently had on rotation: ‘Paint Me Silver’ (Pond, 2017), ‘Colors’ (Black Pumas, 2019), ‘the angel of 8th ave.’ (Gang of Youths, 2022), ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ (Aretha Franklin, 1968) and ‘Make It Wit Chu’ (Queens of the Stone Age, 2007). Enjoy!
The Thought
Today’s Thought is from the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky:
“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.”
And that’s the end of this stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion from your regular journey.
Thanks to everyone who subscribes - I genuinely appreciate your interest and support. If you like The Bus, please SHARE it with a friend or several hundred.
If you haven’t climbed aboard, please do!
Until the next stop …
Much of the information for this Stop is from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, 2001. Pollan will be a topic of future Stops, and this book is today’s recommendation.
A garden of herbs and other plants with medicinal properties. Personally, I’d LOVE one of these.
Dutch explorers brought home countless varieties of plants from around the world, fuelling a desire to change the ‘spectacularly flat, monotonous, and swampy’ landscape of the Low Countries (Pollan 85).
‘Tulip’ is a derivation of the Turkish tülbend - or turban. The first bulbs arrived in Europe in 1554 when Ogier Ghislain de Busbeq, the Austrian ambassador in Constantinople, brought them to Vienna. Which, in turn, led to Clusius taking them to Leiden, and it’s all downhill from there. Tulipomania (Fitzwilliam Museum)
Though in the 17th Century, no one knew what made a tulip ‘break,’ in the 20th Century it was discovered the source was a virus spread from tulip to tulip by the peach potato aphid (Pollan 89).
The most coveted of the ‘broken’ tulips was Semper Augustus (see the illustration for this issue). Though no longer in existence, it can be seen in the numerous paintings commissioned by patrons who could not afford it in reality. Semper Augustus was the most beautiful and the most famous of the tulips - inevitably because of its scarcity (at one point only 12 bulbs existed).
Adriaan Pauw, a director of the Dutch East India Company, had a garden in which he kept hundreds of tulips - gathered around a gazebo he’d panelled with mirrors so the flowers were multiplied into ‘armies of straight-standing stems’ - an ‘ostentatious display of wealth.’ Semper Augustus Tulip (Atlas Obscura).
Unsurprisingly, there are many questions over the actual extent of the tulip bubble and financial crash. Ann Goldgar (Garrett and Anne Van Hunnick Chair in European History at USC Dornsife and author of Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)) notes that in reality, while a form of tulipomania did happen, there were far fewer individuals who’s fortunes peaked and crashed as a result of speculation in the tulip market. For a rather sober account of the craze, see: Tulip-Mania (History.com).