Tulipomania by Mike Dash Read Free Book Online Page B

discovery, acknowledging that the brilliant new flowers “bring pleasure to our eyes by their charming variety.” But he remained a man of science first and foremost, and when he heard from Rye that the tulips’ original owner had eaten them with relish, he resolved to investigate their potential as a foodstuff. He had a Frankfurt apothecary named Müler preserve some bulbs in sugar and then ate them as sweetmeats. They proved, in his considered opinion, to be far tastier than orchids.
    Even in a war-torn and frequently starving Europe, tulips never really caught on as a delicacy (though they were consumed in quantity by the Dutch during the “hunger winter” they endured at the end of the Second World War). The central role that Clusius played in the history of the flower had nothing to do with the experiments he conducted with Müler and everything to do with his habit of dispatching specimens of the plants he encountered to correspondentsall over Europe. As slow as the European mails of the time were, they were unlikely to harm tulip bulbs, and thanks in large part to Clusius and his circle the flower established itself in gardens from Jena to Vienna, Hungary to Hesse.
    By now the botanist was at the height of his powers. A contemporary portrait shows a long-faced gentleman of obvious intelligence with a steady, piercing gaze. He appears handsome and distinguished and wears his hair brushed back from his forehead, his mustache thick and his beard short and neatly clipped above a full ruff, in the fashion of the day. For a solitary man who never married and had minimal contact with his family for years on end, Clusius had a remarkable number of friends. In person he was both earnest and—being often troubled by ill health—inclined to melancholy, yet there was obviously something very compelling about him, for he maintained lifelong friendships with dozens of men and women from very different backgrounds. His skill with languages must have been a help—he spoke at least nine, including French, Flemish, Italian, English, Spanish, German, and Latin—but it was undoubtedly his passion for plants and his extraordinary knowledge of botany that made so many people in so many different countries look forward to his next letter and anticipate the wonders his packages might contain. His correspondent Marie de Brimeu, whose proper title was princess de Chimay, and who lived at The Hague, seems to have harbored something approaching maternal feelings for the old bachelor and sent him numerous presents and parcels of food. It was Marie who bestowed on Clusius perhaps the compliment he treasured most; he was, she wrote, “the father of every beautiful garden in this land.”
    Clusius was not the only botanist spreading bulbs and seeds about the continent in this way—some of the tulips he grew for himself in Mechelen had been sent to him by his friend Thomas Rehdiger from Padua—but he was probably the most active, not least because his repeated and lengthy absences abroad meant he rarely kept a gardenof his own. Instead, he took pleasure in stocking the gardens of his friends, and they in turn provided him with a host of experimental seedbeds with which to investigate the properties of the plants he had discovered.
    Clusius made full use of his friends’ gardens in preparing some of the masterful botanical studies to which he devoted much of the latter part of his life. These books, which included detailed studies of the flora of Spain, Austria, and Provence, were among the first to assume that plants are more than simply potential ingredients in the dubious medical preparations of the day and are worthy of study in their own right. Because of this Clusius has always been considered one of the fathers of botany, not least because he developed a system for classifying plants in groups according to their characteristics—an idea that would later be taken up by Carl Linnaeus and turned into one of the foundation stones of