Humanist, physician, and botanist, Carolus Clusius, the Latinized version of Charles de l'Ecluse (1526-1609), was most responsible for introducing the tulip to the Netherlands, transforming gardens there and throughout Europe. Botany was becoming a discipline in its own right and no longer considered a branch of medicine, the plants of interest only for their medicinal or culinary properties. Clusius was one of the first in northern Europe to recognize plants for their own sake, valuing their beauty as well as their use. In 1573, he was invited by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II to establish a botanical garden (hortus botanicus) in the capital at Vienna, for which Busbecq gave him seeds and bulbs, although Clusius also had possessed tulips of his own.
The emperor's son Rudolf II provided only dilatory support for the imperial garden, however, and Clusius was dismissed in 1577. Eventually, in the autumn of 1593, he was persuaded to accept a position at the University of Leiden as honorary professor of botany where he supervised the establishment of a botanical garden, bringing with him his own collection of tulip bulbs (including variegated ones) which he planted that year. The next spring, in 1594, the first tulips flowered in the northern Netherlands.
That same year, Clusius wrote a colleague complaining that the exclusive world of the connoisseur was being cheapened by too many people becoming involved in the flower trade. Everyone was asking for flowers and, instead of free exchange among a like-minded coterie of collectors, they now were being bought and sold. Refusing himself to sell to those he suspected of wanting his tulips only to show or resell for a profit, most of Clusius' bulbs were stolen, usually by the gardener or a servant. Indeed, he lost bulbs every year between 1580 and 1584, with losses in the years to follow. Although Clusius saw a division between those who collected tulips as a form of art, with a hierarchy of varieties and characteristics for the most desirable, and those who commodified them as an item of trade, tulips had become commercialized.
Eventually, this fascination with the flower would effloresce as tulipmania.
The seeds of the horse chestnut that Quackelbeen had sent to Mattioli did not germinate. In 1581, Clusius received seeds, as well, from a successor to Busbecq as ambassador to Constantinople. The woodcut above was made from Clusius' original drawing of the young plant, which was cultivated in the Hapsburg gardens in Vienna but had not yet flowered. Eventually grown throughout Europe, both the lilac and horse chestnut are native to the mountains of the Balkan peninsula.
Court physician and director of the imperial garden, Clusius traveled all over Europe in search of new specimens. He first wrote about the tulip in an appendix to Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historia (1576) on the flora of Spain and Portugal, which described approximately two hundred rare plants for the first time, and again in an appendix to Rariorum aliquot stirpium, per Pannoniam, Austriam, & vicinas quasdam provincias observatarum historia (1583) on the plants of Austria and Hungary (Pannonia had been the name of the Roman province). Clusius collected this material, together with descriptions of many new plants (including the potato) and his unpublished work on fungi, in his masterpiece Rariorum plantarum historia (1601), where he speaks of weakened tulips breaking in color.
In the 1583 edition, Clusius relates that an Antwerp merchant sometime earlier had received a consignment of cloth that unexpectedly included tulip bulbs, which he mistook for onions, some of which the clothier ate, discarding the rest in his garden. (Although the year 1562 has been indicated, Clusius himself gives no date.) The unfamiliar flowers piqued the interest of Joris Rye from nearby Mechelen, who transplanted the few surviving bulbs to his own garden and wrote to Clusius about the discovery. Clusius may have seen tulips, himself, when he moved to Mechelen in 1568, staying with the nobleman Jean de Brancion, whose garden he designed. Tulips are not mentioned in the writings of Clusius until 1570, when a correspondent thanked him for the gift of a small bulb, and asked for a larger one.
The hundreds of woodcuts for Clusius' work on the plants of Spain and Portugal were ordered by the printer, Christopher Plantin of Antwerp, who used them to illustrate, not only Clusius, but the herbals of Lobelius and Dodoens.
The illustration is from the 1576 edition (University of Leiden).
Reference: Ein Garten Eden (2001) by H. Walter Lack and translated by Martin Walters; Tulipomania (1999) by Mike Dash; Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007) by Anne Goldgar..
