The Netherlands, sacred gardens for tulips for four hundred years-Liberation

This spring, more than a million tourists are again expected in Keukenhof, in the Netherlands, the largest floral park in the world. During its reopening, Thursday, March 20, 20,000 people in this Dutch Disneyland of the hyacinths, jaws, roses, and especially Tulips. If the flower remains one of the most bought in the world and a profitable business for the kingdom, the world’s leading producer, the madness of the tulip which agitated it in the 17th century, giving rise to one of the first Speculative bubbles in historyseems far away.

Native of the Chinese Pamir, she was first cultivated in the East. The Ottoman sultans, notably Soliman the magnificent from the 16th century, garnished their gardens. Bulbs, offered in gifts, then arrived to the West. Dutch botanists fell in love with the exotic ornamental flower and started to import it. “The rich bourgeois wanted beautiful gardens on the model of those of Constantinople. The merchants have seen it as a profit of profit, ships have loaded entire boxes of bulbs from the Ottoman Empire, bought even before their arrival ”, relates Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran, lecturer in monetary and banking economics at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. A real « tulipomania » seized the country from 1634. The prices fly away: a single bulb of Semper Augustusvariety of white and red tulip tulip, the most coveted, can reach 3,000 guilders. Or the price of a new coach, two gray horses and their harness, or several rebellious paintings.

But this crazy love only lasted three years: in 1637, the « Krach of the Tulip » arose. “Prices have become delusional, sales no longer followed. The merchants, who bought the cargoes hoping to sell them more, could no longer repay their debts and the bubble broke out, Unroll Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran, who evokes the episode in his book Critical chronicles of the economy (Bréal, 488 pp., € 18). Some historians say that this has led to depression in the Netherlands, others that there have been no consequences as that. There is a debate. « 

Today, in the Netherlands, the controversy is more about the enormous quantities of pesticides spilled on the fields of tulips, to the detriment of farmers, residents, of the florists and the environment. Scientists have noticed that case of parkinson disease increased Particularly among residents close to the fields.

What is not debated, on the other hand, is that the craze for the tulip remains. « The fantasy of the big bourgeois of the 17th century who had fed tulipomania is always a bit diffuse, concludes the economist. The tulips evoke the gardens of Constantinople, it is steeped in history and that may explain why they are still very popular. ”