Why this striking red-and-yellow tulip is a rare relic of a golden age (2024)

The most fascinating thing about the tulip is that it has never possessed any medicinal properties nor served a utilitarian purpose (granted, when prepared safely the bulbs were eaten as a last resort during times of extreme food shortages). It has little or no scent, so essentially tulips have never had any real purpose to justify their enormous presence in our gardens, apart from sitting there and just looking gorgeous. At nearly 250 years old, Tulipa ‘Absalon’ is a beautiful relic of a time when people valued this flower above all else.

For hundreds of years, travellers and collectors have taken plants from distant lands and brought them back in their wild forms to be hybridised and cultivated into new garden varieties. But when tulips emerged out of Turkey in the 16th century, if not earlier, they were already a thing of beauty and sophistication, with diverse colours and forms, having been in cultivation there for centuries.

Various people were instrumental in their introduction from Turkey via Austria into the rest of Europe. The person who popularised them, from 1570, was the French botanist and physician Carolus Clusius (1526–1609). He sent the first bulbs to England around 1578, as noted by the English traveller and geographer Richard Hakluyt who remarked in his 1582 publication, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, that: ‘within these foure yeeres there have bene brought into England from Vienna ... divers kinds of flowers called Tulipas, ... procured thither ... by an excellent man called M. Carolus Clusius’.

Back on the continent, the flower’s popularity grew quickly as its novelty caused a rise in demand, and prices increased. Shrewd, quick-thinking merchants, as well as some tulip growers began to make a lot of money. To add a frisson of delight, some of the mainly single colour tulips started to display coloured stripes, streaks or swirls of contrasting colours over the yellow or white background. Holland, in particular, was hit the hardest in its desire for these almost magical flowers. Between 1634 and 1637, the most coveted flowers became these rare and mysteriously ‘broken’ tulips.

Enormous sums of money changed hands as bulbs, real or speculative, offered the potential to make anyone’s fortune. This game of chance culminated in the well-recorded frenzy ‘tulipomania’ or tulpenwoede, literally ‘tulip fury’. But unbeknown to these frantic buyers, once the bulb’s flower had broken, it grew weaker until it stopped flowering altogether.

These ‘breaking’ symptoms had been first recorded in 1576 by Clusius. ‘[A]ny tulip thus changing its colour is usually ruined afterwards ... only to delight its master’s eyes with this variety of colours before dying as if to bid him farewell’. This is why the most famous and very expensive tulips like ‘Semper Augustus’ (red-and-white stripes) in the 1630s, and ‘Viceroy’ (white, streaked with purple) in 1637, gradually became extinct. The reason behind the flowers’ strange behaviour, which led to Clusius’ prophetic words, were not discovered for another 352 years.

When the tulipomania bubble finally burst, ‘never again’ the people cried. True to their word, when the stirrings of hyacinth mania began to emerge nearly a hundred years later, in the 1730s, the Dutch government swiftly printed a warning in 1734 to head off a potential new flower ‘fury’.

In the intervening years, the inexplicable tulip ‘breaking’ had taken on mythical proportions that confounded breeders for centuries. In 1780, Tulipa ‘Absalon’ became one of these beautiful aberrations, characterised by the swirling pattern of a rich burgundy-brown over a yellow background.

So, what sorcery was this that had led to the previous tulip madness? The answer was finally revealed in 1927 by Dorothy Mary Cayley (1874-1955), a mycologist working at the John Innes Institute (now the John Innes Centre). She discovered that the ‘breaks’ that produced these beautiful tulips, so prized during tulipomania, were actually caused by a virus spread by aphids. By grafting one half of an infected bulb to a healthy half, the virus could be transmitted. Why did the answer not come sooner, people ask? The word ‘virus’ wasn’t understood in the modern sense until the 1880s, and the electron microscope, which enabled researchers to track the virus, was not developed until the 1920s.

Since that time, infected or naturally broken tulips have come and gone; in fact, they were usually promptly destroyed for fear of infecting any surrounding plants. But this cursed beauty also enables us to preserve tulips like ‘Absalon’, whose colouration appears to be the result of a natural occurrence and so has not succumbed like other broken tulips.

T. ‘Absalon’ is a stable and long-flowering variety, a true antique garden flower but one that serves to remind us of a time when the tulip became more beautiful and desirable as the result of a disease that could only lead to their ultimate extinction.

Extracted from A Short History of Flowers: The stories that make our gardens by Advolly Richmond with illustrations by Sarah Jane Humphrey, published by Frances Lincoln