I am currently reading Anne Goldgar’s excellent Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), a book which is perhaps less about tulips themselves than about what they represented in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic. Much like the balloon-o-mania of the 1780s, for this era’s moral commentators, tulips were emblematic of what they perceived as the particular follies and excesses of their day. As luxury commodities, tulips became the focus of much larger societal debates about ideas of trust and value, scarcity and abundance, stasis and change: ideas which continue to frame debates about capitalism’s moral dimensions. It’s an academic book, well researched, but very readable, and does a great job of dispelling some of the more outlandish myths about tulipmania and the madness of crowds which tend to be wheeled out with every whiff of a market bubble.
Meanwhile, in other tulip news, we have another breaker!
This broken tulip has appeared in a pot with others of the same type. From the buds that are now emerging you can see that there are a few other affected / infected bulbs, which will also develop stripey two-tone flowers.
While my last breaker was a triumph tulip, this is a tulip of the “lily” type, with long stems and flowers, which are particularly tall and elegant.
The cultivar is called “Merlot”, and the bulbs which are emerging true to type certainly have a beautifully liquid, wine-dark quality.
In a pot of tulips that seem particularly refined and polite, this late-arriving gatecrasher has found things a little too sedate, and decided to liven things up a bit.
Personally I’m quite looking forward to the appearance of more of its loud and shouty rowdy friends.
Sadly, my tulip party is almost over, but I’ve enjoyed more than a month of glorious colour and excitement.
I’ve grown many different kinds this year, from delicate species tulips (which I hope will naturalise where I’ve planted them) to bold Darwins, with huge goblet flowers.
My fortuitous “breakers” are definitely my favourites (I am still undecided about what to do about these bulbs, and it seems, from your divided opinions that you are too!). But there are two other cultivars I’ve particularly enjoyed, and which deserve their own special mention, before the party’s over.
The first is “Apricona”, which was one of the first tulips to bloom, right at the beginning of April.
. . . the flowers appeared at first as coral pink . . .
. . . but, over time, faded to that kind of elusive peachy hue that Monty Don is always waxing lyrical about.
‘Apricona’ is a triumph type tulip, and its blooms have certainly been triumphant and incredibly long lasting . . .
. . . flowering for over a month, and only finally going over in the past few days.
My other favourite is also a triumph tulip . . .
This is “Silver Dream” . . .
. . . a pale tulip with dark stems, mauve feathering . . .
. . . and an unusual ghostly appearance.
“Silver Dream” shares its space with some much brighter hot pink tulips, and I’ve been surprised by how much it draws the eye. . . .
. . .while simultaneously retaining its unusual misty quality.
Tulips are generally very definite flowers but “Silver Dream” is about as close as a tulip might get to being described as ethereal. I love it!
Those of you who do not share my tulipmania will be pleased to hear that I’ll have more to say about knitting in coming weeks. Last year we held a particularly joyous and colourful summer KAL, focused on my Tonnach cardigan. . .
. . .and there’s another Summer cardi at the heart of this year’s KAL: can you guess which it might be?
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