The Dutch and I Still Have Tulipmania
An ode to my favorite flower 🌷
To my beloved paid subscribers: I didn’t intend to be gone for so long. (Life!) I appreciate you more than just about anything, so I’m extending your subscriptions by three months. Thank you for supporting. ♥️
If you’re new here, perhaps due to this note that made the rounds, welcome! I’m Megan McCarty, a lifestyle writer based in Los Angeles. Night Vision is a home for my musings on people, places, and products I adore and hope you will too. Because we’re all trying to see in the dark.
Years ago, in the doldrums of lockdown when we were all a bit deranged, I had a two-hour Zoom session with a past lives astrologer. According to her, I’ve died in every type of natural disaster and now Pluto just wants me to have fun. She didn’t mention that I was a Dutch man in the 1630s, but I know that was one of my lives that didn’t end with a tsunami. I can hear myself rambling in that sing-songy language packed with too many vowels, wearing puffy bloomers, and jacking up the price of tulip bulbs to cause the mania to crash. I was a terrible tradesman who loved tulips.
“The tulips are too excitable.” — Sylvia Plath
Before I moved to Los Angeles I drudged through 34 godawful midwestern winters, one worse than the next. I commend those of you who don’t mind the cold, but I no longer have the will to scrape ice off my windshield. Every October to April, I suffocated under the low, lifeless clouds. If you had told me that the sky was permanently painted gray I would’ve shrugged in submission.
Tulips are the most inspiring sign of spring’s awakening. They appear after that last April snowstorm breaks your spirit, just when you think this is the year winter never ends. That’s when last fall’s tulip bulbs poke their curious little heads through the brown earth. Tulips feel like hope. Like falling in love for the first time. Like King’s Day in Amsterdam, watching drunk men stumble into canals. Like lungs full of air that’s five degrees too cold. Like my birthday, April 25th, “the perfect date.” All you need is a light jacket. Like complete trust that Mother Earth has got this.
I’m no tulip expert though, just a fan. Anna Pavord, meanwhile, spent years traveling, researching, and writing The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad, a book title that truly tickles me. She calls tulips “a flower that has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual and cultural baggage than any other on earth." What a weight on those little stems. Can’t say the same about roses, huh?
Of course, tulips are most synonymous with The Netherlands, my home away from home, even though Amsterdam is also trapped under gray skies. Tulips were introduced to the country in the 16th century via the Ottoman Empire. (Today’s Turkey, if your geography teacher failed you.) Those silly Dutch were instantly obsessed with the flower, and it became a status symbol of the elite. If today’s class war revolved around gardens, it wouldn’t feel like such a moral drain on society. Instead of betting on big pharma, which I fool myself into thinking I’m not invested in, to hopefully help me retire someday, how about flowers? Delightful.
The first tulip bulbs arrived in Antwerp in 1562 and the merchant who received them was so confused that he thought they were some exotic form of onion. The most expensive bulb, Semper Augustus, at one point sold for more than one of Amsterdam’s canal houses. One of my favorite quirks about the Dutch is their lack of window coverings, perfect for letting your eyes linger into someone’s window a little too long. The closest I’ll get to owning a canal home is my small collection of KLM Delft Blue houses, some still full of gin.
Joke’s on the schmuck who bought that overpriced tulip though, since it became infected with Tulip Breaking Virus. “Broken” tulips are the striped blooms that can often only be tracked within Dutch still life paintings. The virus breaks the flower’s solid color, creating dramatic feathers or flames, ultimately killing the strain. Their most striking feature was also their downfall.
Centuries after the mania crashed, tulips kept providing for the Dutch. During the “Hunger Winter” between 1944 and 1945, the goddamn Nazis cut off food supplies to the western part of The Netherlands. So they ate tulip bulbs. Apparently they taste little bitter and a little sweet, with a starchy texture and a floral aftertaste. I’ll take their word for it. Through Operation Manna, allied forces began air-dropping food to the starving Dutch population. The Dutch worked with what they had to express gratitude, spelling “many thanks” in fresh-cut tulips for allies flying overhead to see.
Sylvia Plath may have thought that tulips were too excitable, but perhaps she didn’t see past those exciting first days of spring, when each individual flower stands proud. Give tulips some time though, and they slowly give up, as we all do in some way. They weep and wilt, and are just as beautiful dramatically surrendering.
It’s my birthday tomorrow. A handful of years ago I celebrated my 30th at Keukenhof gardens, which will forever have a standing in the Top 5 days of my life. Picture acres and acres of color-blocked tulips, controlled cultivation against the (almost fake?) backdrop of windmills. Perhaps that’s where I made some bad deals on bulbs in the 17th century. There’s a calmness at Keukenhof that feels like home. When I die in this lifetime, is it too much to ask one of you to scatter some of my ashes there? Or at least plant a tulip bulb for me?
Tulipmania Comes Home
My favorite tulip-themed items for home: crop top // candles // lined notebook // 1930s lithograph // The Tulip Garden // tulips in blue vase // green print // lambswool blanket
🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷
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Happy Birthday Taurus queen!!!!! 🌷👑
Happy Birthday!!