The Truth about Tulips

Hi everybody! I am looking out my window at today's version of the biblical rainstorms and it seemed like a good time to write something about tulips--since their season is fast approaching. We all love tulips--they give us brilliant color when our eyes are desperate to see it. They come in such an array of forms and shapes, heights and colors. Want over the top baroque? Tulips can give it to you. Ruffled and girly--no problem. Simple and tailored? Exotic and mysterious? Yep. Ever since the Turkish ambassador made a gift of bulbs to Flemish botanist Charles de l'Ecluse in 1530, these wonderful bulbs have filled the world with their color and magical beauty.
There is a fair amount of mystery about tulip culture--and that's what got me thinking about this. I am doing a bit of research into this and will make a post in the Spiffy tips about that---but what I want to talk about here is how tulips fit into history. Most people have heard of the "Tulip Mania" that supposedly siezed Holland in the 1600's and ultimately destroyed the economy--but the fact of the matter is, things didn't really happen that way. Thanks to Wikipedia I have a better idea of what Tulip Mania really was.
After Charles (okay--Chuckie the Botanist) grew the bulbs and they were seen to thrive in their new home in Holland, they became an object of fascination and a status symbol in that country. Classed by color, the broken colored varieties especially the pink and white and purple and white combinations were highly sought after. It takes 7 to 10 years for tulips to bloom from seed, and several years for new clone bulbs that form on the parent bulb to reach maturity, so its easy to see that the supply was limited for these plants. Add to that the fact that when tulips achieve maturity and do bloom, the main bulb disappears, and clone bulbs form in their place--meaning that the plantings of the tulips were not entirely permanent.
Now you have a sought after plant, and a limited supply. Prices go up.
As this began to happen, people began to begin to grow tulips as a source of income. The traditional school of thought is that people of all economic levels from Millionaires to paupers began dabbling in tulips--but research has found evidence of tulip culture for money only in the middle class or higher echelons. People began to purchase futures of tulip crops--and the speculation began. A lot of religious institutions looked upon this practice as a form of gambling and wrote some highly sensational pamphlets about the evils of tulip "mania". These pamphlets formed the basis for the historical perception that all of Holland was staggering around in a tulip induced haze, arresting people for accidentally eating tulip bulbs, trading their estates and lands for a single bulb etc.
What really happened was interesting, but not nearly so cataclysmic. People traded futures and some small fortunes were made or lost. Something quite similar happened when Hyacinths first hit the market. However, when the bottom dropped out of the Tulip market, it really crashed and burned in a way that Hyacinth values did not. Some of what happened was related to the ending of the Thirty Years War, and an uptick in available money in circulation because of that; some of it was related to a legal change in the futures contracts for the tulips. The contracts at first were legally binding--if you agreed to buy 100 bulbs at 5 bucks apiece and when they were ready to go they were only selling for 1.00 apiece--tough toenails for you. Pay up and enjoy your stupidly expensive bulbs. But the florists guild got parliment to change the way the contracts were administered--and they all became option contracts. This meant if you agreed to pay 5 bucks and they were only worth 1 at harvest, you could pay a penalty and the contract would be voided. Add to that the bubonic plague was flying all around and people were generally freaked out, and you have the recipe for a strange set of circumstances, and an even stranger set of reactions to the phenomenon.
So the "Tulip Mania" of old may not have been the first "speculative bubble" as many people have claimed, but it was a period of time when flowers went about doing that voodoo that they do do so well--and people spent some time being hypnotized by a plant. When Holland awoke from the trance, she had a bit of a hangover, and the psychological effects of the rise and fall in prices for a PLANT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD reverberated in their society for a long time. Fortunately for us, they have never lost their adoration for this beautiful genus, and the tulip growing business is alive and well in Holland. Now each winter we can open the pages of those glossy catalogs with their highly colored (and sometimes disingenously photoshopped) photos and dream of melting snow and brilliant colors fluttering in the warm sun. YES I SAID SUN!!!!!!!! THERE WILL BE SUN!!!!!!
Now go eat some pie and wait for the rain to stop!
Hail to the Dirt!