Tulipomania

On the forty-second page of “Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused” author Mike Dash wrote (most emphasis added):

of his own. Instead, he took pleasure in stocking the gardens of his friends, and they in turn provided him with a host of experimental seedbeds with which to investigate the properties of the plants he had discovered.

Clusius made full use of his friends' gardens in preparing some of the masterful botanical studies to which he devoted much of the latter part of his life. These books, which included detailed studies of the flora of Spain, Austria, and Provence, were among the first to assume that plants are more than simply potential ingredients in the dubious medical preparations of the day and are worthy of study in their own right. Because of this Clusius has always been considered one of the fathers of botany, not least because he developed a system for classifying plants in groups according to their characteristics—an idea that would later be taken up by Carl Linnaeus and turned into one of the foundation stones of modern science.

In May 1573, while Clusius was still living in Mechelen and busy distributing tulip bulbs and other plants throughout Europe, he was asked by the Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian II, to go to Vienna and establish an imperial hortus—or botanic garden—there. This was a tempting offer. Clusius's father, whom he had been supporting had just died at the age of eighty-one freeing his son from the burden of caring for him. The proposed salary of five hundred Rhine guilders a year would let Clusius—who had been embarrassingly dependent on the charity of friends for years—live comfortably at last. And Maximilian wanted a garden to outshine those his princes and nobles had been cultivating. Clusius, whose poverty and scanty claim to the ranks of nobility had left him with something of an inferiority complex, was flattered by the attention and grateful that the emperor offered formal acknowledgment of his status as a noble. In addition, he already knew a little about his prospective patron, who was one of the few emperors ever to show sympathy toward the Protestant faith; his friend and regular correspondent Johannes Crato

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(Three Rivers Press, January 2001. Paperback, 288 pages. ISBN: 060980765X; EAN: 9780609807651.)