A tragic and romantic legend (is there any other kind?) tells us that the first European hyacinths mysteriously sprang up along the coast of Holland one miraculous April in the mid-1500’s. They were the result of a shipwreck months earlier when a merchant vessel from Turkey foundered in a storm and spilled its cargo of thousands of the unknown bulbs into the sea.
Despite its drama, except for the part about their coming from Turkey, this story is pure fiction – but the facts are even more interesting. The hyacinth was brought back to Europe, specifically to the first botanical garden at Padua, by that intrepid German physician and botanist, Leonhardt Rauwolf, in 1576.
When his travel journals were published, they created a sensation. Renaissance Europeans had one of their first insights into the fascinating details of daily life in the Middle East. This included the first mention of a new beverage all the rage in the souks of Arabia: coffee. He wrote: “It is black as ink and very useful in treating various ills… They are accustomed to drink it in the morning, even in public, without fear of being seen,” adding that it made him feel “curiously animated”.
Rauwolf’s life mission, his passion, was to track down and “gain a clear and distinct knowledge of those delicate herbs described by [the ancients] by viewing them in their proper and native places and to encourage the apothecaries to procure the right sorts for their shops.”
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November 2005
Hyacinth |
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| During the Dutch hyacinth craze in 1734, a single bulb could fetch up to $5000 |
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Even four centuries later, the insight and information he gathered is still studied for clues to the unique properties and potential of an incredible range of plants.
Hyacinth’s usefulness was soon found to be more household than healing. Gerard’s great English herbal describes how the bulbs are “full of a slimie glewish juice, which will serve to set feathers upon arrows instead of glew, or to paste bookes with,” and, perhaps most practical in Elizabethan England, provided “the best starch” for keeping neck ruffs crisp.
But their lush, unforgettable scent is hyacinth’s main claim to fame. Combined with their rich colours, reliability in the garden, and ease with being forced into bloom in the winter, they soon became as coveted as that other Turkish superstar: the tulip. Just one generation after the Dutch fashionable class had lost their shirts in the wild financial speculation known as ‘tulipomania’, they were at it again with the hyacinth. For a few years starting in 1734 the prices for hyacinth bulbs climbed to shocking heights: a single bulb for a double-flowering plant could fetch the equivalent of five thousand dollars.
The spell of the hyacinth is still strong. Jane Austen captured it best in Northanger Abbey when her heroine says she’s “just learnt to love a hyacinth,” despite being “naturally indifferent about flowers.” Her hero replies “You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.”
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