Lynne Galluzzo is a fine gardener & a great storyteller who lives in the town of Haymarket in Prince William County, Virginia. She tells us that "tulips were something rare & sought after by the wealthy. In 1593, a famous bulb specialist, horticulturalist Carolus Clusius, took some Viennese bulbs with him to Holland. Because he was so boastful & covetous of his tulip bulbs & because he refused to part with them at any price, some angry but enterprising tulip enthusiasts banded together & stole the bulbs from him. Clusius was so broken from this that he gave up cultivating bulbs completely. However, the thieves embarked on tulip production at full throttle. Because the seeds from one tulip can produce many different varieties of flowers, Holland was soon filled with hundreds of different varieties.
"Sometimes one tulip in a garden of perhaps a hundred would bloom differently than the rest. It would unfurl with streaks of a contrasting color on the main body, often called flames, or feathers. That one unusual bulb was the prize bulb that could be sold for large amounts of money; a single bulb could even be used as currency to buy things of value like a house. Legends abound, including one about a miller that exchanged his whole mill for one bulb & a bridegroom that accepted one tulip as sufficient dowry. The Dutch tried some crazy things to increase the frequency of these special blooms, including sprinkling dry pigment powder over beds of white tulip bulbs. Unknown to them, the variations actually came from a virus that was spread from tulip to tulip by aphids. Because the prized, unusual bulbs were caused by a virus, the flowers were beautiful, but sick, & produced less-than-healthy bulbs.
"Trading in tulip bulbs became so intense that people left thriving occupations to become bulb traders. Where the actual bulbs were once the currency, promissory notes for future bulbs were starting to be traded. Then on February 2, 1637, the auction market opened & there was no one willing to speculate with enormous amounts of money on the pieces of paper that represented a possible future bulb with a special flower. And just like a stock market crashing from over inflated values, the Dutch tulip market tanked. The only thing that survived was the Dutch knowledge & love for growing tulips. Holland is still a major producer of tulip bulbs."
You can find more of Lynn Galluzzo's tulip musings & garden insights here at The Piedmont Lifestyle.
