Willowwindsswept Tulip Silhouette. Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois, USA
What would Botanic Gardens be in Spring without Tulips? Even a most marvellous place such as the Chicago Botanic Garden at Glencoe, north from Chicago an hour or so by efficient Metra train?
Tulips were, of course, only introduced to the West from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Soon everyone had to have tulips. It was particularly through the work of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), onetime prefect of the Imperial Botanical Garden of Maximilian II at Vienna and later famous and influential professor of botany at the newly founded University at Leiden in the Netherlands, that tulips became to be greatly admired; and he put down, too, the foundations for their scientific study.
The late '30s of the seventeenth century saw a brief period of 'Tulipomania'. An illness of the human spirit which led people to see tulips not as something in their own natural right, but as a commodity to be traded; indeed, as a form of currency. Much like present-day Wall Street commodities and stocks and their excess, the price of tulips was hugely inflated. They were traded even when faded, their bulbs split and sold and resold. One tulip might easily be priced at many years' salary. Great fortunes were made and lost again. Scholars today still debate just how much impact this 'economic bubble' had on the general economy of countries like Holland.
One of the few direct historical sources for this Tulip Madness is a description given of it by the professor of botany of the Groningen University, Abraham Munting (1626-1683). His father - who had preceded him as professor - had a 'Groningen Paradise', a Hortus or Botanical Garden. Always in need of money to buy new and exotic plants, he decided to venture into the trading of tulips in 1636. Henricus didn't actually lose money, but he'd expected to become wealthy from his schemes. Abraham - ten years old at the time - much later details the events with a fine sense of irony and amazement. He claims that this madness in fact originated in France (not suprisingly for him; he is writing in the early '70s, in the middle of the disastrous events for Holland that led to the war of 1672 in which the French king Louis XIV was an infamous enemy). Tulips were so favored in Paris that gentlemen gave them to their ladies instead of jewels; but when their erstwhile admirers learned of the financial debacle in Holland, the flowers 'lost their admiration, which proved to be as short as the Tulip's own beauty'.
And already here in the Botanic Garden at Glencoe, too, these beautiful specimens are falling from the height of their Bloom...
Willowwindsswept Tulip Silhouette. Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois, USA
What would Botanic Gardens be in Spring without Tulips? Even a most marvellous place such as the Chicago Botanic Garden at Glencoe, north from Chicago an hour or so by efficient Metra train?
Tulips were, of course, only introduced to the West from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Soon everyone had to have tulips. It was particularly through the work of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), onetime prefect of the Imperial Botanical Garden of Maximilian II at Vienna and later famous and influential professor of botany at the newly founded University at Leiden in the Netherlands, that tulips became to be greatly admired; and he put down, too, the foundations for their scientific study.
The late '30s of the seventeenth century saw a brief period of 'Tulipomania'. An illness of the human spirit which led people to see tulips not as something in their own natural right, but as a commodity to be traded; indeed, as a form of currency. Much like present-day Wall Street commodities and stocks and their excess, the price of tulips was hugely inflated. They were traded even when faded, their bulbs split and sold and resold. One tulip might easily be priced at many years' salary. Great fortunes were made and lost again. Scholars today still debate just how much impact this 'economic bubble' had on the general economy of countries like Holland.
One of the few direct historical sources for this Tulip Madness is a description given of it by the professor of botany of the Groningen University, Abraham Munting (1626-1683). His father - who had preceded him as professor - had a 'Groningen Paradise', a Hortus or Botanical Garden. Always in need of money to buy new and exotic plants, he decided to venture into the trading of tulips in 1636. Henricus didn't actually lose money, but he'd expected to become wealthy from his schemes. Abraham - ten years old at the time - much later details the events with a fine sense of irony and amazement. He claims that this madness in fact originated in France (not suprisingly for him; he is writing in the early '70s, in the middle of the disastrous events for Holland that led to the war of 1672 in which the French king Louis XIV was an infamous enemy). Tulips were so favored in Paris that gentlemen gave them to their ladies instead of jewels; but when their erstwhile admirers learned of the financial debacle in Holland, the flowers 'lost their admiration, which proved to be as short as the Tulip's own beauty'.
And already here in the Botanic Garden at Glencoe, too, these beautiful specimens are falling from the height of their Bloom...