“Clusiana is said to have travelled from the Mediterranean to England in 1636, which, as the first tulips had reached our shores about 1580, is an early date in tulip history. [She] takes her name from Carolus Clusius (or Charles de Lecluse) who became Professor of botany at Leiden in 1593….
“Her native home will suggest the conditions under which she likes to be grown: a sunny exposure and a light rich soil. If it is a bit gritty, so much the better. Personally I like to see her springing up amongst grey stones, with a few rather stunted shrubs of Mediterranean character to keep her company: some dwarf lavender, and the grey-green cistus making a kind of amphitheatre behind her while some creeping rosemary spreads a green mat at her feet….
“A grouping of this kind has the practical advantage that all its members enjoy the same treatment as to soil and aspect, and, being regional compatriots, have the air of understanding one another and speaking the same language. Nothing has forced them into an ill-assorted companionship.”
Sometimes I’m easily amused, such as when I post photographs of tulips in front of a gray stone, then get lucky enough to find a quotation (like the one from Vita-Sackville West above) that describes tulips among gray stones — w00t!
His heart was in his garden; but his brain Wandered at will among the fiery stars. Bards, heroes, prophets, Homers, Hamilcars, With many angels stood, his eye to gain; The devils, too, were his familiars: And yet the cunning florist held his eyes Close to the ground, a tulip bulb his prize….
“Tulipa clusiana: Originally from Kashmir, northern Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, this plant, first described by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1803, is named for the great botanist Carolus Clusius, who in the latter part of the sixteenth century was professor of Botany at Leiden University and one of the first to study bulbs systematically. Nicknamed the ‘Lady Tulip,’ T. clusiana is a slender plant with a small starlike flower with carmine-red blotches on the three outer petals, a violet base, and narrow leaves that are undulating and grayish-green….
“Tulipa clusiana Cynthia: A cultivar of T. clusiana that was registered by C. G. van Tubergen in 1959, the outer petals of ‘Cynthia’ are reddish, edged chartreuse-green, and from a distance the flower appears soft orange. Inside it is feathered red on green and the base is purplish. The bulb is the same size as that of T. clusiana. ‘Cynthia’ grows well and is 25 centimeters in height.…
“Tulipa clusiana var. chrysantha: Described in 1948 by Sir Alfred Daniel Hall but known before then, this tulip was found in the mountains of northern Afghanistan in the same area where T. clusiana was found. It was first known as T. chrysantha and later as a variety of T. clusiana. A slender variety with small leaves and a flower form that is slightly elongated, its crisply pointed petals are deep yellow with a vast red blush on the exterior, visible when the flower is closed.”
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On the same stroll through the gardens where I snagged photos of red tulips (see Some Time with Red Tulips (1 of 2) and Some Time with Red Tulips (2 of 2)), I also came across a few nice batches of Tulipa clusianavarieties, all aglow in the morning sunlight. Exactly which variant these flowers belong to escapes me a bit; they’re similar enough that I included mention of two of the varieties above, since they’re probably one of those two. They are all clearly members of the T. clusiana family, however; and they’re all commonly referred to by the name “Lady Tulip” — blooming in white, yellow, orange-yellow, and pale-yellow colors, and typically featuring shades of red on the outer sides of their petals. Personally I’ve never seen white ones — but I’d like to! — as it seems the yellow/orange varieties are more common here in the southeast.
April cold with dropping rain Willows and lilacs brings again, The whistle of returning birds, And trumpet-lowing of the herds. The scarlet maple-keys betray What potent blood hath modest May, What fiery force the earth renews, The wealth of forms, the flush of hues….
Hither rolls the storm of heat; I feel its finer billows beat Like a sea which me infolds; Heat with viewless fingers moulds, Swells, and mellows, and matures, Paints, and flavors, and allures, Bird and brier inly warms, Still enriches and transforms, Gives the reed and lily length, Adds to oak and oxen strength, Transforming what it doth infold, Life out of death, new out of old… Fires gardens with a joyful blaze Of tulips, in the morning’s rays….
“The extraordinary outburst of financial speculation in the province of Holland during the 1630s (‘tulipomania‘) is well known. Although still theoretically under Spanish rule, the Dutch had been building up an extremely successful economy, largely through trade, with many of the key aspects of modern capitalism being invented in Amsterdam; however, given the country’s geography, investment in land was difficult — so money had to seek other routes to grow. Tulips were one such speculative investment; they became status symbols for the newly rich merchant and financier class, which stimulated both a rise in prices and efforts to breed ever more exquisite blooms….
“The most sought-after bulbs were those infected with the tulip breaking potyvirus, which caused elaborate streaking in the petals. As far as the breeder was concerned, a tulip was only as good as its infection, which (since there was no understanding of either genetics or viruses) had to be left entirely to chance.”
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This is the second of two posts featuring photos of tulips I took a few weeks ago; the first post is Some Time with Red Tulips (1 of 2). A few of these streaked varieties appeared in that first post; this one shows some with peppermint stripes and those with large streaks of yellow and orange. And today we learned that the presence of these streaks is not just a flower variation: the streaks are caused by tulip breaking virus — and tulips are only one of two plant genuses (the other is lilies) where potyvirus causes color variations in the flower petals. Who knew?!?
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s May Day poem is an elaborate meditation on seasonal transitions, especially that of the advent of spring, the emergence of bird-song, and the resurgence of new plants and flowers. I excerpted a very short portion — a section that led up to the (appropriate to my photoshoot) appearance of tulips in morning light — but the poem is much, much longer. If you’d like to take a look at the rest, here’s a link to the whole thing: May-Day by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“[As] they were passing by me into the garden, I asked them to let me be one of their company.
“The Gentleman of the house told me, if I delighted in flowers, it would be worth my while; for that he believed he could shew me such a blow of tulips, as was not to be matched in the whole country….
“I was very much pleased and astonished at the glorious show of these gay vegetables, that arose in great profusion on all the banks about us….
“Sometimes I considered them with the eye of an ordinary spectator, as so many beautiful objects varnished over with a natural gloss, and stained with such a variety of colours, as are not to be equalled in any artificial dyes or tinctures….
“Sometimes I considered every leaf as an elaborate piece of tissue, in which the threads and fibres were woven together into different configurations, which gave a different colouring to the light as it glanced on the several parts of the surface….
“Sometimes I considered the whole bed of tulips… as a multitude of optic instruments, designed for the separating light into all those various colours of which it is composed.”
I wanted to stay as I was, still as the world is never still, not in midsummer but the moment before the first flower forms, the moment nothing is as yet past —
not midsummer, the intoxicant, but late spring, the grass not yet high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips beginning to open….
Hello!
Sometimes I find a quotation that so accurately captures the experience of seeing and photographing a batch of flowers, that little else needs to be said. The first quotation above — originally published in a British journal called The Tatler in 1710 — could have been written about these red and multicolored tulips I found growing in the partial shade of some large oak, maple, and dogwood trees at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens a couple of weeks ago. On a bright spring morning, the sun created a lot of reflected light from all directions, producing the kind of backlighting and side-lighting that I like to work with, while still letting me preserve accurate color and detail in wide-angle shots.
From “Banksiae Lutea” in Old Roses by Graham Murphy:
“Banksian roses are named in honour of Lady Dorothea Banks, the wife of the renowned botanist, Sir Joseph Banks. These plants are vigorous ramblers, producing flexible, green almost thornless canes about 6 metres in length. Because the flowers are borne in trusses on side-shoots, most profusely when these are two or three years old, pruning involves removing any very old wood and some of the five-year-old canes, leaving the remainder to flower another two or three years. Rosa banksia lutea is the hardiest variety and flowers best on a sheltered south-facing wall; although only slightly fragrant, it is one of the world’s finest roses, with large hanging sprays of tiny, double, pale yellow flowers.”
“Britain was to play a major role in bringing Chinese roses to Europe, through the medium in which she felt most comfortable, foreign trade, spurred on by the scientific and practical curiosity of men such as Sir Joseph Banks, botanist, explorer, patron of the natural sciences, President of the Royal Society, friend and adviser to King George III and virtual director of the King’s garden at Kew….
“[The] British sent two diplomatic missions to the Chinese Emperor; the first set off in 1793, led by colonial administrator Lord Macartney and armed with much helpful advice from Sir Joseph Banks, who wanted to find out as much as he could about Chinese know-how in all spheres of science, manufacturing and the arts….
“Banks was particularly concerned to find out all he could about plants, and how the Chinese gardened.”
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered….
Hello!
Upon learning that the plant whose photos appear below was called “Lady Banks’ Rose” — also sometimes called “Banks’s Rose” and officially Rosa banksiae or Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ for deeper yellow variations — I started digging around in my books, books, and more books to see what I might discover about the plant and its history. As with all plant history stories, things get complicated pretty quickly, and the two short quotations above barely hint at the challenges involved in relocating plants from the Chinese empire to Great Britain during the Victorian era.
The second book I referenced above — The Rose: A True History by Jennifer Potter — has one long chapter devoted to the efforts of Sir Joseph Banks and others to bring plants to the west, efforts that involved some intrigue, numerous failures, gobs of money, and months of travel. In Potter’s telling, it seems that only one rose plant that would ultimately be named after Lady Banks survived the trip, a white one from which seeds and further cultivation would eventually be used to create the yellow Lutea version — which is what I think I have pictured, as even those blooms that are lighter in yellow color looked more saturated depending on the angle from which they were photographed.
As is so often the case when I go on these little research expeditions, I stumbled across a word that was new to me in the book Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders: Pteridomania. Pteridomania has nothing to do with roses (or dinosaurs, which was my first thought). It instead refers to “a Victorian craze for ferns” — a startlingly specific definition to describe Victorian obsession with the shapes and forms of ferns: fern plants; big ferns in pots and little ferns in windows; pictures, photographs, and drawings of ferns; and the incorporation of fern-form into the design elements of everything from household goods to carpet, and building structures to wallpaper. While it is equally likely that fern motifs pre-date their appearance in Victorian Britain or Victorian America, it is just as likely that any representation of ferns you might see in the design of a pot or a mirror, or a window frame or a door cornice, had its cultural genesis in the Victorian era’s pteridomania.
The idea that there was a botanical mania associated with certain historical periods was also new to me. Yes, I’d heard — and you likely have too — of “tulip fever” or “orchid mania” (which is actually and delightfully called “orchidelirium“), but I hadn’t really thought of them as distinct historical periods that intersected with or overlapped periods of botanical exploration, imperialism, and transplanting plants from one country to another. So far I’ve learned about twenty such periods from the seventeenth century onward; I won’t name them all but I imagine I could spend a lifetime studying them.
Such an intersection of history, botany, and obsession occurred for roses too: “Rose Mania” is the title of a thirty-page chapter in The Rose: A True History, which opens with the author’s rousing description of rose-wilding in Europe and the United States:
“Rose mania, which gripped Europe and America in the mid to late-nineteenth century, may not have been as sudden or as catastrophic as the tulip fever that flared among the Dutch in the 1630s, but it defined its age just as dramatically. Accumulation, expansion and conspicuous display were the new watchwords, as breeders competed to bring the newest, largest, most spectacular varieties to market, and consumers of all classes sought to acquire the latest breeds.
“By the 1880s, rose parties were all the rage in Britain (or so an editorial in the Gardeners’ Chronicle would have us believe), held ‘every day, all day long, and far into the night’. If rose parties at midday were apt to be hot, dusty and exhausting affairs, ‘Roses at break of day — a dewy one — are simply divine — so full of beauty, freshness, and fragrance, as to fill and satisfy and soothe our every sense of pleasure. Roses by moonlight offered even greater pleasures, when they seem ‘so different in colour and even form as to appear altogether new and different flowers. The perfume, too, is fuller, richer, sweeter; and perhaps, to enjoy Roses to the full, it would be well at times to meet them in the gloaming or by moonlight alone.'”
“Rose mania” doesn’t have its own fancy name like “pteridomania” — but that’s true for a lot of the floral eras, most of which are called by the name of a flower followed by “mania” or “fever”. So I thought I could make up my own name for rose mania, one you can use when you’re standing amidst a batch of blooming roses, getting pleasantly lightheaded inhaling the rose scent, all while wondering who your Victorian ancestral flower-manics might have been. Let’s call rose mania: the Rosencrazies.
