Tulipomania: When Tulips Sold For The Price of a House
March 5, 2014 by Robin Plaskoff Horton
Photo by Bahman Farzad
When modern gardeners and travelers think of Holland, they invariably think of tulips. Most tulip bulbs sold today come from Holland, and it is hard for a gardener to think of the Dutch without images of Keukenhof coming to mind. But the tulip is not native to Holland. It is, in fact, native to Central Asia and was introduced to Holland by the Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius, who, in 1593, brought home a selection of tulip bulbs from Constantinople and planted them in his garden.
Unfortunately, Clusius had some dishonest neighbors who stole some of the bulbs right out from under his nose and sold them. This was the rather inauspicious start of the now-heralded Dutch bulb trade.
Tulips grew in popularity over the next few decades and became a fad among the wealthy. The price of bulbs began to increase until a single bulb could sell for a sum equal to five times the cost of a typical home. Thus began Tulipomania, the world’s first futures market.
You might ask, what would bring someone to pay such an exorbitant price for a plant? Some economists have pondered that very thought. Brown University economist Peter Garber reasons that the outbreak of the bubonic plague during that period may have made people increasingly willing to take risks, having learned firsthand that life was capricious and ephemeral, much like a flower.
Since tulips were bought on the promise that a flower would sprout from a bulb in the ground, Earl Thompson, the late UCLA professor of economics, has theorized that Tulipomania was a reaction to an anticipated government conversion of futures contracts into options contracts, thus lowering the risk of buying something that didn’t yet exist.
Records from the time indicate people coveted owning a flower that had such unusually bright coloring, the likes of which had not been seen in Holland at the time, one which the Dutch found to be extraordinarily exquisite. According to Mike Dash, author of Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower, ”It is impossible to comprehend the tulip mania without understanding just how different tulips were from every other flower known to horticulturists in the 17th century. The colors they exhibited were more intense and concentrated than those of ordinary plants.”
As a tulip lover myself, I like Dash’s explanation. I want to believe the reason for Tulipomania was the beauty of the flower. In the early 1600s, Holland was in its Golden Age. Money, previously used to fight for the country’s independence from Spain, was now used for commerce. Holland was becoming wealthier, with Amsterdam merchants at the heart of the lucrative West Indies trade. A popular way to assert success was to build a large estate with a garden larger than the main house. It’s difficult for us in this modern era to understand, but having a large flower garden in the 1600s was considered in many parts of Europe to be one of the best ways to show one’s wealth and exhibit to others one was cultured. And for the Dutch at the time, there was no better flower to have in their gardens than a rare tulip.
According to an article in The Big Picture by James Narron and David Skeie, “By late January 1637, isolated florists sold their holdings and failed to reinvest. Other florists took notice. By the first week of February 1637, the boom ended with a crash that began at an auction in Haarlem.” Alas, the unstable and unsustainable tulip bubble burst. Fast forward to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and you get the picture.
Economists differ in opinion about the extent of Tulipomania’s effect on the Dutch economy. Some say it had a significant impact, while others say it did little to affect the Dutch economy as the trade only existed among a select few. Either way, it’s incredible to think that a plant could have that much effect on an entire nation. There is also much debate about how many people were involved in buying and selling tulip bulbs for such enormous sums of money. I would be lying if I were to say I didn’t like the idea of the tulip, a thing of ephemeral beauty, bringing an entire nation to its knees.
Unless otherwise noted, all images via Colorblends.
Category: Bulbs and Plants, Experiencing, Garden Design
Tags: Colorblends, garden hsitory, Holland, tulips
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Informative history, thanks. Many ancient Turkish ceramics have tulips in their motif.
— March 6, 2014 @ 11:02
Really enjoyed the article. I will be looking for it on your Facebook page to share the link
— March 6, 2014 @ 14:54
I really enjoyed reading this! I also love the bright colors and beauty of tulips – and, as an economist, I like reading about what may have been the first speculative bubble. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it DOES rhyme.
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