The Botany Of Desire Part 3

The modern tulip has become such a cheap and ubiquitous commodity that it's hard for us to recover a sense of the glamour that once surrounded the flower. That glamour surely had something to do with its roots in the Orient-Anna Pavord speaks of the "intoxicating aura of the infidels" that surrounded the tulip. There was, too, the preciousness of the early tulips, the supply of which could be increased only very slowly through offsets, a quirk of biology that kept supply well behind demand. In France in 1608, a miller exchanged his mill for a bulb of Mere Brune. Around the same time a bridegroom accepted a single tulip as the whole of his dowry-happily, we are told; the variety became known as "Mariage de ma fille."

Yet tulipomania in France and England never reached the pitch it would in Holland. How can the mad embrace of these particular people and this particular flower be explained?

For good reason, the Dutch have never been content to accept nature as they found it. Lacking in conventional charms and variety, the landscape of the Low Countries is spectacularly flat, monotonous, and swampy. "An universall quagmire" is how one Englishman described the place; "the b.u.t.tock of the world." What beauty there is in the Netherlands is largely the result of human effort: the dikes and ca.n.a.ls built to drain the land, the windmills erected to interrupt the unbroken sweep of wind across it. In his famous essay on tulipomania, "The Bitter Smell of Tulips," the poet Zbigniew Herbert suggests that the "monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colorful, and unusual flora."

Such dreams could be indulged as never before in seventeenth-century Holland, as Dutch traders and plant explorers returned home with a parade of exotic new plant species. Botany became a national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today. This was a nation, and a time, in which a botanical treatise could become a best-seller and a plantsman like Clusius a celebrity.

Land in Holland being so scarce and expensive, Dutch gardens were miniatures, measured in square feet rather than acres and frequently augmented with mirrors. The Dutch thought of their gardens as jewel boxes, and in such a s.p.a.ce even a single flower-and especially one as erect, singular, and strikingly colored as a tulip-could make a powerful statement.

To make such statements-about one's sophistication, about one's wealth-has always been one of the reasons people plant gardens. In the seventeenth century the Dutch were the richest people in Europe and, as the historian Simon Schama shows in The Embarra.s.sment of Riches, The Embarra.s.sment of Riches, their Calvinist faith did not keep them from indulging in the pleasures of conspicuous display. The exoticism and expense of tulips certainly recommended them for this purpose, but so did the fact that, among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless. Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were sources of medicine, perfume, or even food. In the West flowers have often come under attack from various Puritans, and what has always saved them has been their practical uses. It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them. their Calvinist faith did not keep them from indulging in the pleasures of conspicuous display. The exoticism and expense of tulips certainly recommended them for this purpose, but so did the fact that, among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless. Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were sources of medicine, perfume, or even food. In the West flowers have often come under attack from various Puritans, and what has always saved them has been their practical uses. It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them.

When the tulip first arrived in Europe, people set about fas.h.i.+oning some utilitarian purpose for it. The Germans boiled and sugared the bulbs and, unconvincingly, declared them a delicacy; the English tried serving them up with oil and vinegar. Pharmacists proposed the tulip as a remedy for flatulence. None of these uses caught on, however. "The tulip remained itself," Herbert writes, "the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign." The tulip was a thing of beauty, no more, no less.

If the tulip's useless beauty suited the Dutch taste for display, it also meshed with the age's humanism, which was striving to put some breathing s.p.a.ce between art and religion. Unlike the rose or the lily, say, the tulip had not yet been enlisted as a Christian symbol (though tulipomania would eventually change that); to paint a vase of tulips was to delve into the wonders of nature rather than into the storehouse of iconography.

I also think the particular character of the tulip's beauty made it a good match for the Dutch temperament. Generally bereft of scent, the tulip is the coolest of floral characters. In fact, the Dutch counted the tulip's lack of scent as a virtue, a proof of the flower's chasteness and moderation. Petals curving inward to hide its s.e.xual organs, the tulip is an introvert among flowers. It is also somewhat aloof-one bloom per stem, one stem per plant. "The tulip allows us to admire it," Herbert observes, "but does not awaken violent emotions, desire, jealousy or erotic fevers."

None of these qualities would seem to portend the frenzy to come. But as it would happen, the outward composure of Dutchman and tulip alike held sleeping within it something else.

One crucial element of the beauty of the tulip that intoxicated the Dutch, the Turks, the French, and the English has been lost to us. To them the tulip was a magic flower because it was p.r.o.ne to spontaneous and brilliant eruptions of color. In a planting of a hundred tulips, one of them might be so possessed, opening to reveal the white or yellow ground of its petals painted, as if by the finest brush and steadiest hand, with intricate feathers or flames of a vividly contrasting hue. When this happened, the tulip was said to have "broken," and if a tulip broke in a particularly striking manner-if the flames of the applied color reached clear to the petal's lip, say, and its pigment was brilliant and pure and its pattern symmetrical-the owner of that bulb had won the lottery. For the offsets of that bulb would inherit its pattern and hues and command a fantastic price. The fact that broken tulips for some unknown reason produced fewer and smaller offsets than ordinary tulips drove their prices still higher. Semper Augustus was the most famous such break.

The closest we have to a broken tulip today is the group known as the Rembrandts-so named because Rembrandt painted some of the most admired breaks of his time. But these latter-day tulips, with their heavy patterning of one or more contrasting colors, look clumsy by comparison, as if painted in haste with a thick brush. To judge from the paintings we have of the originals, the petals of broken tulips could be as fine and intricate as marbleized papers, the extravagant swirls of color somehow managing to seem both bold and delicate at once. In the most striking examples-such as the fiery carmine that Semper Augustus splashed on its pure white ground-the outbreak of color juxtaposed with the orderly, linear form of the tulip could be breathtaking, with the leaping, wayward patterns just barely contained by the petal's edge.

Anna Pavord recounts the extraordinary lengths to which Dutch growers would go to make their tulips break, sometimes borrowing their techniques from alchemists, who faced what must have seemed a comparable challenge. Over the earth above a bed planted with white tulips, gardeners would liberally sprinkle paint powders of the desired hue, on the theory that rainwater would wash the color down to the roots, where it would be taken up by the bulb. Charlatans sold recipes believed to produce the magic color breaks; pigeon droppings were thought to be an effective agent, as was plaster dust taken from the walls of old houses. Unlike the alchemists, whose attempts to change base metals into gold reliably failed, now and then the would-be tulip changers would be rewarded with a good break, inspiring everybody to redouble their efforts.

What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert-a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through. It wasn't until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens. the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens.

By the 1920s the Dutch regarded their tulips as commodities to trade rather than jewels to display, and since the virus weakened the bulbs it infected (the reason the offsets of broken tulips were so small and few in number), Dutch growers set about ridding their fields of the infection. Color breaks, when they did occur, were promptly destroyed, and a certain peculiar manifestation of natural beauty abruptly lost its claim on human affection.

I can't help thinking that the virus was supplying something the tulip needed, just the touch of abandon the flower's chilly formality called for. Maybe that's why the broken tulip became such a treasure in seventeenth-century Holland: the wayward color loosed on a tulip by a good break perfected the flower, even as the virus responsible set about destroying it.

On its face the story of the virus and the tulip would seem to throw a wrench into any evolutionary understanding of beauty. What possible good could it do a flower for an infection that decreases its fitness to enhance its appeal to people? I suppose a case could be made that the virus, by adding fuel to the frenzy of tulipomania, led to the planting of many more tulips in the hope of finding more breaks. But the fact remains that, because of people's idiosyncratic notion of tulip beauty, for several hundred years tulips were selected for a trait that would sicken and eventually kill them.

This would seem to represent a perversion of natural selection, a violation of the laws of nature. And so it is-considered from the vantage point of the tulip. But what if the question is considered instead from the vantage point of the virus? The rule of law is restored. What the virus did was to insinuate itself into the relations.h.i.+p between people and flowers, in effect exploiting human ideas of tulip beauty in order to advance its own selfish purposes. (Which, if you think about it, is not so different from what humans did when they elbowed into the old relations.h.i.+p of bees and flowers.) The more beautiful the breaks produced by the infection, the greater the number of infected plants in Dutch gardens and the more total virus in circulation. What a trick! As a survival strategy, the virus's scheme was brilliant, at least as long as people didn't figure out what was going on. For where else in nature has a disease rendered a living thing more lovely? And not just lovely, but lovely in a previously unimagined way, for the virus created an entirely new way for a tulip to be beautiful, at least in our eyes. The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.

The transformation of the tulip from a jewel-box flower to a (virus-free) commodity has made the tulip oddly hard to see. Ma.s.sed in the landscape, tulips register on us mostly as instances of pure color; they could almost be lollipops or lipsticks in the landscape. At least this is how they used to register on me-as eye candy, pleasurable enough but weightless. I am not by nature a great noticer, and for all the years between the time when my parents paid me to plant tulips in our yard and the spring of this writing, the beauty of tulips-their specific beauty-was lost on me. But I don't think the problem is unique to me.

"Beauty always takes place in the particular," the critic Elaine Scarry has written, "and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down." In a sense, particular tulips are hard to come by-because they are so cheap and ubiquitous, that's partly why, but also because their form and color are, more than those of most flowers, peculiarly abstract. Far more than a rose, say, or a peony, an actual, specific tulip closely resembles our preconceived idea of a tulip. By now the tulip's parabolic curves are as deeply etched into consciousness as a c.o.ke bottle's; with a fidelity that is remarkable (and that is far more typical of a commodity than a thing in nature), the tulips one meets in the world match the tulips resident in one's head. In color, too, tulips are so uniform and faithful (like paint chips) to whatever shade they profess to be that we quickly take it in-this idea idea of yellow or red or white-and then move on to consume the next visual treat. Tulips are so tuliplike, so platonically themselves, that they skate past our regard like models on a runway. of yellow or red or white-and then move on to consume the next visual treat. Tulips are so tuliplike, so platonically themselves, that they skate past our regard like models on a runway.

One way to begin to slow down and recover the particular beauty of a tulip, I discovered this spring, is to bring one indoors and look at it individually. This, I think, may be even more helpful than planting older or more exotic varieties, for I suspect that even some of the Triumphs and Darwins sold in the ma.s.s-market mesh bags would, if cut and brought indoors and then really looked at, also hold the power to astonish. It is no accident that botanical ill.u.s.trators and photographers have so often brought their scrupulous eye to bear on this particular flower: it rewards that particular gaze like no other.

I eventually want to bring that gaze briefly to bear on a single tulip-the Queen of Night sitting before me on my desk this late-May morning. Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative s.p.a.ce, as flowers or shadows of a flower.

This particular effect was prized by the Dutch, and the quest for a truly black tulip-a quest that has gone on for at least four hundred years and goes on still-became one of the more intriguing subplots of tulipomania. Alexandre Dumas pere pere wrote a whole novel- wrote a whole novel-The Black Tulip-about a compet.i.tion in seventeenth-century Holland to grow the first truly black tulip; the greed and intrigue inspired by the contest (in the novel the Horticultural Society had put up a prize of 100,000 guilders) destroyed three lives. By the time the "miraculous tulip" appears, Cornelius, the man who bred it, is in jail, wrongly imprisoned on a tip by his neighbor, who has claimed the prize flower as his own. Cornelius glimpses the culmination of his life's work through the bars of his cell: "The tulip was beautiful, splendid, magnificent; its stem was more than eighteen inches high. It rose from out of four green leaves, which were as smooth and straight as iron lance heads; the whole of the flower was as black and s.h.i.+ning as jet."

But why a black black tulip? Perhaps because the color black is so rare in nature (or at least, in living nature), and tulipomania was nothing if not a vast and precarious edifice poised on the finest points of botanical rarity. Black also carries connotations of evil, and the mania would later come to be seen as a morality tale about worldly temptation, in which a whole people succ.u.mbed, ruinously, to not one but an entire bouquet of deadly sins. At the same time, black, like white, is a blankness onto which any and all desire (or fear) may be projected. For Dumas the black tulip was a synecdoche for tulipomania itself, an indifferent and arbitrary mirror in which a perverse consensus of meaning and value came briefly and disastrously into focus. tulip? Perhaps because the color black is so rare in nature (or at least, in living nature), and tulipomania was nothing if not a vast and precarious edifice poised on the finest points of botanical rarity. Black also carries connotations of evil, and the mania would later come to be seen as a morality tale about worldly temptation, in which a whole people succ.u.mbed, ruinously, to not one but an entire bouquet of deadly sins. At the same time, black, like white, is a blankness onto which any and all desire (or fear) may be projected. For Dumas the black tulip was a synecdoche for tulipomania itself, an indifferent and arbitrary mirror in which a perverse consensus of meaning and value came briefly and disastrously into focus.

A second story is told, this one possibly true, about a black tulip discovered by a poor shoemaker at the height of the madness. In the version that Zbigniew Herbert tells, five gentlemen from the union of florists in Haarlem, all dressed in black, pay a visit to the shoemaker, professing to do him a good turn by offering to buy his tulip bulb. The shoemaker, sensing their avarice, begins to bargain in earnest, and after much haggling the two parties settle on a price for the bulb: 1,500 florins, a sum that to the shoemaker is a windfall. The bulb changes hands.

"Now something unexpected happened," Herbert writes, "something that in drama is called a turning point." The florists throw the precious bulb to the ground and stomp it to a pulp.

" 'You idiot!' they shouted at the stupefied shoe patcher, 'we also have a bulb of the black tulip. Besides us, no one else in the world! No king, no emperor or sultan. If you had asked ten thousand florins for your bulb and a couple of horses on top of it, we would have paid without a word. And remember this. Good fortune won't smile on you a second time in your entire life, because you are a blockhead.' " The shoemaker, devastated, staggers to his bed in the attic and dies.

Herbert's view of the tulipomania is itself unremittingly black. To him the Dutch frenzy had nothing whatever to do with beauty, only with the consuming evil of the fixed idea, a phenomenon that can, at any time, destroy the "sanctuaries of reason" on which civilization depends. Herbert's tulipomania is a parable of utopianism, specifically of communism. It is true that, after a certain point, the flowers themselves became irrelevant-a time came when crus.h.i.+ng a particular tulip bulb, or holding a paper "futures contract" for another still in the ground, conferred greater wealth than the most beautiful blossom ever beheld.

Still, it's important to remember that what ended in Holland in madness had begun with the desire for beauty in a place where, it seemed to many, beauty was in comparatively short supply. This was also a country, remember, where everyone, regardless of social cla.s.s, dressed remarkably alike, in the sartorial equivalent of a monotone. Color in this gray Calvinist land must have struck the eye with unimaginable force-and the color of tulips was like no color anyone had ever laid eyes on before: saturated, brilliant, more intense than that of any other flower.

The story of the Semper Augustus, the most celebrated and expensive tulip for most of the seventeenth century, is a reminder that beauty did in fact underwrite the mania-that, at least in Holland in the 1630s, pork bellies could never have subst.i.tuted for tulips. The consensus was that Semper Augustus was the most beautiful flower in the world, a masterpiece. "The color is white, with Carmine on a blue base, and with an unbroken flame right to the top," Nicolaes van Wa.s.senaer wrote in 1624 after seeing the tulip in the garden of one Dr. Adriaen Pauw. "Never did a Florist see one more beautiful than this." There were only a dozen or so specimens in existence-and Dr. Pauw owned nearly all of them. This pa.s.sionate tulip fancier (who was a director of the new East India Company) grew them on his estate in Heemstede, near Haarlem, where he had deployed an elaborate mirrored gazebo in his garden to multiply the effect of his precious blooms. Through the 1620s, Dr. Pauw was bombarded with wildly escalating offers to sell his Semper Augustus bulbs, but he would not part with them at any price. That refusal-which at least one historian credits with igniting the mania-was grounded in the fact that, as Wa.s.senaer tells us, this connoisseur judged the pleasure of looking at a Semper Augustus far superior to any profit.

Before the speculation came the looking.

Looking at my own black tulip, the Queen of Night, here on my desk, I can see it has the cla.s.sic form of the single tulip: six petals arrayed in two tiers (three inner petals cupped inside three outer ones) that draw an oblong vault of s.p.a.ce around the flower's s.e.xual parts, simultaneously advertising and sheltering them from view; each petal is at once a flag and a curtain, drawn. I see too that the petals are not identical: the inner petals have a small, delicate cleft at the top, while the st.u.r.dier outer ones form uninterrupted ovals, their incised edges as clean as a blade's. The petals look soft and silky but are not: to the touch they're unexpectedly hard, like orchid petals, and no more silky than this page. Together the six convex petals fit together to form a tailored, somewhat austere blossom; inviting neither touch nor smell, the flower asks me to admire it from a distance. The fact that Queen of Night has no detectable scent is fitting: this is an experience designed strictly for the delectation of the eye.

The long, curving stem of my Queen of Night is nearly as beautiful as the flower it supports. It is graceful, but graceful in a specifically masculine way. This is not the grace of a woman's neck as much as that of a stone sculpture or the curving steel cables of a suspension bridge. The curve seems economical, purposeful, inevitable in its structural logic, even as it changes over time. A horticulturally inclined mathematician would no doubt be able to represent the stem of my tulip in a differential equation.

As the day warms, the curve of the stem relaxes and the petals pull back to reveal the flower's interior s.p.a.ce and organs. Like everything else about the tulip, these, too, are explicit and logical. Six stamens-one for every petal-circle around a st.u.r.dy upright pedestal, each of them extending, like trembling suitors, a powdery yellow bouquet. Crowning the central pedestal, which botanists call a "style," is the stigma, a pursed set of slightly crooked lips (typically three) poised to receive the grains of pollen, conducting them downward toward the flower's ovary. Sometimes, as now, a single glistening droplet of liquid (nectar? dew?) appears on the stigma's lip, a suggestion of receptiveness.

Everything about tulip s.e.x seems orderly and intelligible; there is none of the occult mystery that attends the s.e.xuality of, say, a Bourbon rose or a doubled peony. Those two are flowers in which one imagines a b.u.mblebee being forced to feel his way around in the dark, stumbling blindly, drunkenly, getting himself all tangled in their innumerable petals. Which is precisely the idea, of course. But it is not the tulip's idea.

In this, I think, lies the key to the distinctive personality of the tulip, if not to the nature of floral beauty in general. Compared to the other canonical flowers, the beauty of the tulip is cla.s.sical rather than romantic. Or, to borrow the useful dichotomy drawn by the Greeks, the tulip is that rare figure of Apollonian beauty in a horticultural pantheon mainly presided over by Dionysus.

Certainly the rose and peony are Dionysian flowers, deeply sensual and captivating us as much through the senses of touch and smell as sight. The entirely unreasonable multiplication of their petals (one Chinese tree peony is said to have more than three hundred) defies clear seeing and good sense; the profusion of folds edges toward a gorgeous, intoxicating incoherence. To lean in and inhale the breath of a rose or peony is momentarily to leave our rational selves behind, to be transported as only a haunting fragrance can transport us. This is what is meant by ecstasy: to be taken out of ourselves. Such flowers propose a dream of abandon instead of form.

The tulip, by contrast, is all Apollonian clarity and order. It's a linear, left-brained sort of flower, in no way occult, explicit and logical in its formal rules and arrangements (six petals corresponding to six stamens), and conveying all this rationality the only way conceivable: through the eye. The clean, steely stem holds the solitary flower up in the air for our admiration, positing its lucid form over and above the uncertain, s.h.i.+fting earth. The tulip's blooms float above nature's turmoil; even when they expire they do so gracefully. Instead of turning to mush, like a spent rose, or to used Kleenex, like peony petals, the six petals on a tulip cleanly, dryly, and, often simultaneously, shatter.

Friedrich Nietzsche described Apollo, in contrast to Dionysus, as "the G.o.d of individuation and just boundaries." Unlike the great ma.s.s of flowers, a tulip bloom stands as an individual in the landscape or vase: one bloom per plant, each one perched atop its stem very much like a head. (Recall that the word tulip tulip comes from the Turkish word for "turban.") Lower down the figure come the elongated leaves, precisely two in most botanical renderings, often deployed like limbs. It's no surprise that the tulip was the first flower to have its cultivars individually named-and named for individuals. comes from the Turkish word for "turban.") Lower down the figure come the elongated leaves, precisely two in most botanical renderings, often deployed like limbs. It's no surprise that the tulip was the first flower to have its cultivars individually named-and named for individuals.

But unlike most other flowers, which bear female or feminine names, the nomenclature of tulips (Queen of Night notwithstanding) is rife with the names of great men, especially generals and admirals. In the Greek mind the Dionysian was most often a.s.sociated with the female principle (or at least with androgyny), the Apollonian with the male. Similarly, the Chinese divided flowers, like everything else, into (female) yin and (male) yang. In Chinese thought the soft and extravagantly petaled peony blossom represents the very essence of yin (though its more linear stems and roots are deemed to be yang). Biologically speaking, most flowers (including tulips) are bis.e.xual, containing both male and female organs, yet in our imaginations they tend to lean one way or the other, their forms recalling masculine or feminine beauty and sometimes even male or female organs. There's a rose in my garden, blowsily doubled and colored the palest pink, that the French call Cuisse de Nymph Emue-it was not enough, apparently, to liken this seductive bloom to the "thigh of a nymph," so it became "thigh of an aroused nymph." You can walk through any garden and choose up sides: boy, girl, boy, girl, girl, girl.... The canonical flowers seem to me almost all female-except, that is, for the tulip, perhaps the most masculine of flowers. If you doubt this, watch next April how a tulip forces its head up out of the ground, how the head gradually colors as it rises. Dig down along the shaft, and you'll find its bulb, smooth, rounded, hard as a nut, a form for which the botanists offer a most graphic term: "testiculate."

Of course, like all of our (Apollonian) efforts to order and categorize nature, this one goes only so far before the (Dionysian) pull of things as they really are begins to take its inevitable toll. I mentioned the orderly arrangement of petals and stamens on the Queen of Night on my desk, yet when I went back to the garden to cut another (I have a completely unreasonable number of Queen of Nights in my garden), I noticed for the first time that the bed was teeming with subtle perversities. Here were Queen of Nights with nine and even ten petals, mutant stigmas with six lips instead of three, and in one case a leaf streaked with deep purple, as if its dull green had been infiltrated by the colored petals overhead, their pigment somehow seeping through the plant's body like a dye or drug.

As anyone who grows a lot of them knows, tulips are p.r.o.ne to such eruptions of biological irrationality-chance mutations, color breaks, and instances of "thievery." Thievery is the tulip grower's term for a mysterious phenomenon that causes certain flowers in a field to revert to the form and color of their parent. What I saw in my bed of Nights was an instance of the wondrous instability that inspired the belief that nature liked to play with tulips more than with any other flower.

A few weeks ago I pa.s.sed through Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, where a large flower bed off Fifth Avenue had been planted with thousands of fat yellow Triumphs, arranged with dulling parade-ground precision. They were exactly the sort of stiff, primary-color tulips I used to plant in my parents' yard. I'd read that even today, at a time when tulip growers struggle mightily to keep their fields free of the virus that causes the flower to break, it still occasionally happens. And there in the middle of that relentless, monotonous bed, I spotted one: a violent eruption of red on a chaste canary petal. It wasn't the most handsome of breaks, but the flare of carmine leaping up from the base of that one bloom stood out in the grid of conformists like an exuberant clown, pulling the rug out from under the dream of order this flower bed was meant to represent.

And there was something thrilling about it-I could hardly believe my luck. To me that careless splash of red seemed almost like a visitation-of the distant tulip past, yes, for here was the return of the virus so a.s.siduously repressed, but of something else, too, some inchoate, underground force that riveted me. It was as if the whole grid of flowers and, by extension, the grid of the city itself had been put in doubt by that one ecstatic, wayward pulse of life. (Or was it death? I guess you'd have to say it was both.) Then, that night, I dreamt about what I'd witnessed, the stiff yellow grid and its solitary red joker. In the dream version the broken tulip appears in the front row, and right beside it lies a fancy fountain pen, a Montblanc. (This is all too embarra.s.sing to make up.) In a gesture of impetuousness completely out of character, I grab them both, the broken tulip and the pen, and run like a man possessed up Fifth Avenue. I'm flying by the spinning doors of the Plaza and Pierre hotels when I snag the attention of the two bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned doormen standing sentry outside the Pierre. They can have no idea who I am or what I've done, but they leap to and give slapstick chase anyway, their cartoon hollerings-"Stop! Thief!"-sounding in my ears as I tear up the avenue, clutching my tulip and pen and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of it all-the circ.u.mstance, but also the dream about it.

Color breaks far more beautiful than the one I saw on Fifth Avenue had helped fire the tulipomania, a speculative frenzy that, like the breaks themselves, can perhaps best be understood as an explosive outbreak of the Dionysian in the too-strict Apollonian world of the tulip-and of the Dutch bourgeoisie. This, at least, is how I've come to think of the tulipomania-as a festival of Dionysus, by turns ecstatic and destructive, transplanted from the forest or temple to the orderly precincts of the marketplace.

Tulipomania bore all the hallmarks of a medieval carnival, in which, for a brief "o.r.g.a.s.mic interim" (in the words of the French historian Le Roy Ladurie), the stable order of society was turned on its head. A carnival is a social ritual of sanctioned craziness and release-a way for a community to temporarily indulge its Dionysian urges. For its duration, the ident.i.ty of everyone swept into its vortex is up for grabs: the village idiot is made king, the poor man suddenly rich, the rich man just as suddenly a pauper. Everyday roles and values are suddenly, thrillingly, suspended, and astounding new possibilities arise.

As with society, so with capitalism in the throes of a speculative mania: all of its values are turned on their head-thrift, patience, value for money, reward for effort. For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed, or rather recast along new lines, ones that will appear absurd in the cold light of the morning after but that make impeccable sense within the fevered s.p.a.ce of the speculative bubble.

It's hard to date with precision exactly when the bubble in Holland formed, but the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That's when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price. Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground, and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers. Now began the windhandel windhandel-the wind trade.

Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair, and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted "florists" who couldn't have cared less. These men were speculators who, only days before, had been carpenters and weavers, woodcutters and gla.s.sblowers, smiths, cobblers, coffee grinders, farmers, tradesmen, peddlers, clergymen, schoolmasters, lawyers, and apothecaries. One burglar in Amsterdam p.a.w.ned the tools of his trade so that he too could become a speculator in tulips.

Rus.h.i.+ng to get in on the sure thing, these people sold their businesses, mortgaged their homes, and invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers. Predictably, the flood of fresh capital into the market drove prices to bracing new heights. In the s.p.a.ce of a month the price of a red-and-yellow-striped Gheel ende Root van Leyden leapt from 46 guilders to 515. A bulb of Switsers, a yellow tulip feathered with red, soared from 60 to 1,800 guilders.

At its height, the trade in tulips was conducted by florists in "colleges"-back rooms of taverns given over to the new business two or three days a week. Colleges quickly developed a set of rituals that sound like a cross between orderly stock market protocol and a drinking contest. Under one common set of procedures, called met de borden, met de borden, or "with the boards," a seller and buyer who wanted to do business were handed slates on which they wrote an opening price for the tulip in question. The slates were then pa.s.sed to a pair of proxies (essentially arbitrators nominated by the traders), who would then settle on a price somewhere between the two opening bids; this they would scribble on the slates before pa.s.sing them back to the princ.i.p.als. The traders could either let the number stand, signifying agreement, or rub it out. If both rubbed out the price, the deal was off; but if only one party declined, that florist had to pay a fine to the college-an incentive to close the deal. When a deal did close, the buyer had to pay a small commission, called the or "with the boards," a seller and buyer who wanted to do business were handed slates on which they wrote an opening price for the tulip in question. The slates were then pa.s.sed to a pair of proxies (essentially arbitrators nominated by the traders), who would then settle on a price somewhere between the two opening bids; this they would scribble on the slates before pa.s.sing them back to the princ.i.p.als. The traders could either let the number stand, signifying agreement, or rub it out. If both rubbed out the price, the deal was off; but if only one party declined, that florist had to pay a fine to the college-an incentive to close the deal. When a deal did close, the buyer had to pay a small commission, called the wijnkoopsgeld: wijnkoopsgeld: wine money. In keeping with the carnival atmosphere, these fines and commissions were used to buy wine and beer for everyone-another incentive to make deals. In a satirical pamphlet describing the scene, an old-timer advises his neophyte friend to drink up: "This trade must be done with an intoxicated head, and the bolder one is, the better." wine money. In keeping with the carnival atmosphere, these fines and commissions were used to buy wine and beer for everyone-another incentive to make deals. In a satirical pamphlet describing the scene, an old-timer advises his neophyte friend to drink up: "This trade must be done with an intoxicated head, and the bolder one is, the better."

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: "the greater fool theory." Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world. By 1636 the taverns were crowded with such people, and as long as Holland remained home to an expanding population of greater fools-people blinded by their desire for instant wealth-the truly foolish act would have been to abstain from the tulip trade.*

Even so, there was more to the windhandel windhandel than mere wind. For the tulip craze marked the birth of a real business-the Dutch bulb trade-that would long outlast the mania. (The same could be said of our own Internet bubble: beneath the froth of speculation is a new and important industry.) According to Joseph Schumpeter, it is not at all unusual for the birth of a new business to be attended by a speculative bubble as capital rushes in, dazzled by the young industry's wildly exaggerated promise. than mere wind. For the tulip craze marked the birth of a real business-the Dutch bulb trade-that would long outlast the mania. (The same could be said of our own Internet bubble: beneath the froth of speculation is a new and important industry.) According to Joseph Schumpeter, it is not at all unusual for the birth of a new business to be attended by a speculative bubble as capital rushes in, dazzled by the young industry's wildly exaggerated promise.

Every bubble sooner or later must burst-the carnival that was permanent would spell the end of the social order. In Holland the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled-real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs-and the market grew jittery.

On February 2, 1637, the florists of Haarlem gathered as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin the bidding at 1,250 guilders for a quant.i.ty of tulips-Switsers, in one account. Finding no takers, he tried again at 1,100, then 1,000 ... and all at once every man in the room-men who days before had themselves paid comparable sums for comparable tulips-understood that the weather had changed. Haarlem was the capital of the bulb trade, and the news that there were no buy-ers to be found there ricocheted across the country. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price. In all of Holland a greater fool was no longer to be found.

In the aftermath, many Dutch blamed the flower for their folly, as if the tulips themselves had, like the sirens, lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin. Broadsides excoriating the tulipomania became best-sellers: The Fall of the Great Garden-Wh.o.r.e, the Villain-G.o.ddess Flora; Flora's Fool's Cap, or Scenes from the Remarkable Year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their wealth and the Wise lost their senses; Charge Against the Pagan and Turkish Tulip-Bulbs. The Fall of the Great Garden-Wh.o.r.e, the Villain-G.o.ddess Flora; Flora's Fool's Cap, or Scenes from the Remarkable Year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their wealth and the Wise lost their senses; Charge Against the Pagan and Turkish Tulip-Bulbs. (Flora was, of course, the Roman G.o.ddess of flowers, who was a prost.i.tute famous for bankrupting her lovers.) In the months after the fever broke, a professor of botany at the University of Leiden, a man named Fortius who occupied Clusius's old chair, could be seen patrolling the streets of the city, beating any tulip he encountered with his cane. At the conclusion of a medieval carnival, it was the carnival king who was hung in effigy. Likewise, the ancient festivals of Dionysus would end in destruction and mutilation and the sacrifice of the G.o.d himself. (Flora was, of course, the Roman G.o.ddess of flowers, who was a prost.i.tute famous for bankrupting her lovers.) In the months after the fever broke, a professor of botany at the University of Leiden, a man named Fortius who occupied Clusius's old chair, could be seen patrolling the streets of the city, beating any tulip he encountered with his cane. At the conclusion of a medieval carnival, it was the carnival king who was hung in effigy. Likewise, the ancient festivals of Dionysus would end in destruction and mutilation and the sacrifice of the G.o.d himself.

It bears remembering that tulipomania was finally a frenzy not of consumption or of pleasure but of financial speculation, and that it took place not in a country ordinarily given to large pa.s.sions but rather in the most stolid bourgeois culture of the time. The Dionysian eruptions of the tulip are relative, in other words, making an impression in direct proportion to their anomalousness.

Certainly the color break I spotted in Grand Army Plaza was like that-a wayward splatter of paint on a monochromatic ground, an extravagance I might not have noticed if not for the scrupulous precinct of order-of petal, of blossom, of plant-in which it happened to detonate. Etymologically, the word extravagant extravagant means to wander off a path or cross a line-orderly lines, of course, being Apollo's special domain. In this may lie a clue to the abiding power of the tulip, as well as, perhaps, to the nature of beauty. The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature and then, in spasms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them. On the same principle, syncopation enlivens a regular, four-four measure of music, enjambment the stately line of iambic pentameter. So here is a third const.i.tuent of beauty to add to the desiderata offered to us by the flower: first came contrast, then pattern (or form), and finally variation. means to wander off a path or cross a line-orderly lines, of course, being Apollo's special domain. In this may lie a clue to the abiding power of the tulip, as well as, perhaps, to the nature of beauty. The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature and then, in spasms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them. On the same principle, syncopation enlivens a regular, four-four measure of music, enjambment the stately line of iambic pentameter. So here is a third const.i.tuent of beauty to add to the desiderata offered to us by the flower: first came contrast, then pattern (or form), and finally variation.

The pleasure we take in the breaking of a too-predictable pattern may account for the allure of the broken tulip, as well as the Rembrandt and the parrot (a type of tulip that explodes the tailored flower into the exuberant frills of a party dress). Then, of course, there is the black tulip, the gothic femme fatale in the masculine world of tulips. In the Queen of Night the mysteriously depthless hue plays against the sunny lucidity of her form. Our eyes and ears quickly tire of any strict Apollonian order that isn't shadowed by some hint, some threat, of trespa.s.s or waywardness.

By the same token, the most breathtaking rose or peony is the one in which the tumbling profusion of its petals is held in check by some kind of form or frame; the slightest suggestion of symmetry-the form of a globe or teacup, say-keeps the bloom from going slack. The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies, which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two G.o.ds of art. Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together. One tendency uninformed by the other can bring forth only coldness or chaos-the stiffness of a Triumph tulip, the slackness of a wild rose. So though we can cla.s.sify any particular flower as Apollonian or Dionysian (or male or female) the most beautiful flowers-like Semper Augustus or Queen of Night-are the ones that also partake of their opposing element.

The Greeks' myth of beauty, the most persuasive I know of, takes us most of, but not all, the way back to beauty's origins in the commingling of tendencies found in the human brain and breast. But the birth of beauty goes back further still, to a time before Apollo and Dionysus, before human desire, when the world was mostly leaf and the first flower opened.

Once upon a time, there were no flowers-two hundred million years ago, to be only slightly more precise. There were plants then, of course, ferns and mosses, conifers and cycads, but these plants didn't form true flowers or fruit. Some of them reproduced as.e.xually, cloning themselves by various means. s.e.xual reproduction was a relatively discreet affair usually accomplished by releasing pollen onto the wind or water; by sheer chance some of it would find its way to other members of the species, and a tiny, primitive seed would result. This prefloriferous world was a slower, simpler, sleepier world than our own. Evolution proceeded more slowly, there being so much less s.e.x, and what s.e.x there was took place among close-by and closely related plants. Such a conservative approach to reproduction made for a biologically simpler world, since it generated relatively little novelty or variation. Life on the whole was more local and inbred.

The world before flowers was sleepier than ours because, lacking fruit and large seeds, it couldn't support many warm-blooded creatures. Reptiles ruled, and life slowed to a crawl whenever it got cold; little happened at night. It was a plainer-looking world, too, greener even than it is now, absent all the colors and patterns (not to mention scents) that flowers and fruits would bring into it. Beauty did not yet exist. That is, the way things looked had nothing to do with desire.

Flowers changed everything. The angiosperms, as botanists call the plants that form flowers and then encased seeds, appeared during the Cretaceous period, and they spread over the earth with stunning rapidity. "An abominable mystery" is how Charles Darwin described this sudden and entirely evitable event. Now, instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand coevolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation. With the advent of the flower, whole new levels of complexity come into the world: more interdependence, more information, more communication, more experimentation.

The evolution of plants proceeded according to a new motive force: attraction between different species. Now natural selection favored blooms that could rivet the attention of pollinators, fruits that appealed to foragers. The desires of other creatures became paramount in the evolution of plants, for the simple reason that the plants that succeeded at gratifying those desires wound up with more offspring. Beauty had emerged as a survival strategy.

The new rules speeded the rate of evolutionary change. Bigger, brighter, sweeter, more fragrant: all these qualities were quickly rewarded under the new regime. But so was specialization. Since bestowing one's pollen on an insect that might deliver it to the wrong address (such as the blossoms of unrelated species) was wasteful, it became an advantage to look and smell as distinctive as possible, the better to command the undivided attention of a single, dedicated pollinator. Animal desire was thus pa.r.s.ed and subdivided, plants specialized accordingly, and an extraordinary flowering of diversity took place, much of it under the signs of coevolution and beauty.

With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world's supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time human desire entered into the natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes. Now came roses that resembled aroused nymphs, tulip petals in the shape of daggers, peonies bearing the scent of women. We in turn did our part, multiplying the flowers beyond reason, moving their seeds around the planet, writing books to spread their fame and ensure their happiness. For the flower it was the same old story, another grand coevolutionary bargain with a willing, slightly credulous animal-a good deal on the whole, though not nearly as good as the earlier bargain with the bees.

And what about us? How did we make out? We did very well by the flower. There were, of course, the pleasures to the senses, the sustenance of their fruit and seeds, and the vast store of new metaphor. But we gazed even farther into the blossom of a flower and found something more: the crucible of beauty, if not art, and maybe even a glimpse into the meaning of life. For look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature's double nature-that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid pa.s.sing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and and necessity. Could that be it-right there, in a flower-the meaning of life? necessity. Could that be it-right there, in a flower-the meaning of life?

CHAPTER 3.

Desire: Intoxication

Plant: Marijuana (CANNABIS SATIVA X X INDICA INDICA).

The forbidden plant and its temptations are older than Eden, go back further even than we do. So too the promise, or threat, that forbidden plants have always made to the creature who would taste them-the promise, that is, of knowledge and the threat of mortality. If it sounds as if I'm speaking metaphorically about forbidden plants and knowledge, I don't mean to. In fact, I'm no longer so sure the author of Genesis was, either.

Living things have always had to make their way in a wild garden of flowers and vines, of leaves and trees and fungi that hold out not only nouris.h.i.+ng things to eat but deadly poisons, too. Nothing is more important to a creature's survival than knowing which is which, yet drawing a bright line through the middle of the garden, as the G.o.d of Genesis found, doesn't always work. The difficulty is that there are plants that do other, more curious things than simply sustain or extinguish life. Some heal; others rouse or calm or quiet the body's pain. But most remarkable of all, there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.

Why in the world should this be so-why should evolution yield plants possessing such magic? What makes these plants so irresistible to us (and to many other creatures), when the cost of using them can be so high? Just what is the knowledge held out by a plant such as cannabis-and why is it forbidden?

Start with the bright line, as all creatures must. How does one tell the dangerous plants from the ones that merely nourish? Taste is the first tip-off. Plants that don't wish to be eaten often manufacture bitter-tasting alkaloids; by the same token, plants that do wish to be eaten-like the apple-often manufacture a superabundance of sugars in the flesh around their seeds. So as a general rule, sweet is good, bitter bad. Yet it turns out that it is some of the bitter, bad plants that contain the most powerful magic-that can answer our desire to alter the textures and even the contents of our consciousness. There it is, right in the middle of the word intoxication, intoxication, hidden in plain sight: hidden in plain sight: toxic. toxic. The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire. The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire.

The manifold and subtle dangers of the garden, to which a creature's sense of taste offers only the crudest map, are mainly the fruits of strategies plants have devised to defend themselves from animals. Most of the ingenuity of plants-that is, most of the work of a billion years of evolutionary trial and error-has been applied to learning (or rather, inventing) the arts of biochemistry, at which plants excel beyond all human imagining. (Even now a large part of human knowledge about making medicines comes directly from plants.) While we animals were busy nailing down things like locomotion and consciousness, the plants, without ever lifting a finger or giving it a thought, acquired an array of extraordinary and occasionally diabolical powers by discovering how to synthesize remarkably complicated molecules. The most remarkable of these molecules (at least from our perspective) are the ones designed expressly to act on the brains of animals, sometimes to attract their attention (as in the scent of a flower) but more often to repel and sometimes even destroy them.

Some of these molecules are outright poisons, designed simply to kill. But one of the great lessons of coevolution (a lesson recently learned by designers of pesticides and antibiotics) is that the all-out victory of one species over another is often Pyrrhic. That's because a powerful, death-dealing toxin can exert such a strong selective pressure for resistance in its target population that it is quickly rendered ineffective; a better strategy may be to repel, disable, or confound. This fact might explain the astounding inventiveness of plant poisons, the vast catalog of chemical curiosities and horrors that first flowered in Cretaceous times with the rise of the angiosperms. The same evolutionary watershed-Darwin's "abominable mystery"-that ushered in the dazzling arts of floral attraction brought with it the darker arts of chemical warfare.

Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them. Others, such as caffeine, unhinge an insect's nervous system and kill its appet.i.te. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant's predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures' mind off lunch. Compounds called flavonoids change the taste of plant flesh on the tongues of certain animals, rendering the sweetest fruit sour or the sourest flesh sweet, depending on the plant's designs. Photosensitizers present in species such as the wild parsnip cause the animals that eat it to burn in the sun; chromosomes exposed to these compounds spontaneously mutate when exposed to ultraviolet light. A molecule present in the sap of a certain tree prevents caterpillars that sample its leaves from ever growing into b.u.t.terflies.

By trial and error animals figure out-sometimes over eons, sometimes over a single lifetime-which plants are safe to eat and which forbidden. Evolutionary counterstrategies arise too: digestive processes that detoxify, feeding strategies that minimize the dangers (like that of the goat, which nibbles harmless quant.i.ties of a great many different plants), or heightened powers of observation and memory. This last strategy, at which humans particularly excel, allows one creature to learn from the mistakes and successes of another.

The "mistakes" are, of course, especially instructive, as long as they're not your own or, if they are, they prove less than fatal. For even some of the toxins that kill in large doses turn out in smaller increments to do interesting things-things that are interesting to animals as well as people. According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs sc.r.a.ping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgils in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub's bright red berries. Pigeons s.p.a.cing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant's special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them "jaguar eyes."