At School We Were Often Told About The Dutch Tulip Bubble,

back in the 1600's fortunes were spent on just one bulb,

brought over from Asia Minor, the flowers enlivened the Dutch landscape, they were sought after just at a time when money was pouring in to the Dutch economy, I had always thought that the bulbs flowering like the ones above was what all of the fuss was about, but it was not so, what people were paying money for was a chance that for no apparent reason some tulips erupted from a solid colour into a swirled, feathery bloom that was incredibly exotic and beautiful,

like this one, Semper Augustus, it was famous for being the most expensive bulb sold during the period, it cost 13000 florins, at a time when one could get a house and garden for a third of that price, no one seemed to know why any single bulb did this, so a new phase was tulip 'futures', speculators were buying bulbs on the chance that one would produce a similar flower, we now know the cause of the one off flower, it was a virus, spread either by contact with the bulb of an infected tulip or by different species of aphids, it changes pigmentation by affecting the distribution of anthocyanin, a pigment that can appear different colours depending on the pH of its area, (also known for the much publicised “French paradox”, we have become aware that certain populations of red-wine drinkers in France and Italy have much lower rates of coronary heart disease (CHD) than their North American and Northern European counterparts, keep drinking the red wine!),


sadly, the virus did what viruses generally do — it killed the tulip after a few blooming seasons, driving up the price for a newly-broken bulb even higher, the virus turned tulips into lottery tickets , and so it was sort of understandable that people paid too much for them, but as all bubbles it burst, but for me interesting as I had never known about the virus that made some of these plants so rare.