The Botany of Desire Page #5

an angiosperm

Has a male part, the stamen,

which produces pollen.

Whether transported by wind,

bees, or humans,

When pollen lands on

the flower's female part,

The pistil, it gets fertilized,

And gives rise to seeds.

The seeds contain

a mix of genes

From both the mother

and the father.

Before that, you had this

greener, sleepier world

Where things reproduce

usually by cloning,

By spores that were genetically

identical to their parents.

Evolution proceeded in a kind of

pokey pace,

Because you didn't have

as much variation.

And then you have this

incredible explosion

Of diversity that happens

with this new strategy.

It was incredibly

successful strategy.

It allowed you

to move your genes around,

It allowed you to evolve

much quicker,

Because sex creates variation.

And the more new combinations

you try,

The quicker you can adapt to

whatever the environment is.

And one particular group

of these angiosperms

Came up with a really, really

clever strategy --

And that was

To appeal not to, you know,

Bugs or birds or bees,

But appeal to us.

The first

wild tulips, scientists think,

Sprang up in the same place

where the apple originated --

The mountains

of central asia.

It was typically kind of

more open than our tulip,

So it had a kind of

hourglassy shape.

Often had a scent,

Often had a slightly different

color inside.

Drawn by the beauty

of these wild flowers,

People learned

how to cultivate them.

Under our attention,

the flower got bigger,

The colors very often

got brighter,

And then we started

experimenting with variation.

From central asia,

The tulip made its way

to turkey.

It was there that

this beautiful flower

Bewitched one of the most

powerful men in the world,

The sultan

of the ottoman empire.

The turks

at various times in history

Revered tulips.

Sultan ahmed iii

was famous

For his love of tulips,

And when they were in bloom

every year,

There was a festival.

Every night there would be

some sort of performance

To celebrate tulips.

It was so extravagant,

in fact,

That this helped bring down

the sultan.

For his spending on tulips

And other perceived failings,

The sultan was toppled

from his throne.

But it wasn't only royalty

That got seduced

by the tulip.

In the early 17th century,

The flower caused a whole

country to go mad.

It was completely irrational.

And I don't think

you can explain it

According to any logical scheme

That this entire society

went nuts.

Between 1634 and 1637,

Tulips swept the dutch

into a collective frenzy

That has become known as

"tulip mania."

Their passion for the flower

Spurred one of the biggest

investment bubbles in history,

And for a brief time,

Made the tulip one of

the most valuable commodities

In the world.

It was a pure financial

Speculative bubble --

And it was about a flower!

I mean, how amazing is that?

It was a time when

the dutch dominated world trade.

And a lot of them

were getting rich.

It became fashionable

to grow flower gardens --

And nothing said "success"

like a tulip.

In the beginning,

The rich people in holland,

They have big houses,

And they want to show

they're wealthy.

At that time, were tulips.

It really was about

the display of

The extraordinary,

the gem.

And you picture, you know,

kind of a gray, cloudy,

Dutch spring afternoon,

And that color against

that steel sky

Is a powerful thing.

For the tulip,

the dutch flower gardens

Offered a chance

to strut its stuff --

And no tulips did so

more dramatically

Than the type known as

broken tulips.

They were extremely rare,

But, back then,

no one knew why.

A break was when

The background color,

the solid, matte,

Saturated color

of a tulip

Gets a kind of flame

of a second color;

And when this happened,

This was considered, you know,

the most beautiful tulip.

The most prized of

all the broken tulips

Was one of the rarest --

the semper augustus.

It was a big,

white tulip

With a splash of carmine red

on it,

Which was really,

by general account,

Considered the greatest tulip

ever found.

This was the epitome

of tulip beauty

In the eye of the dutch.

If you wanted

a semper augustus

To bloom in your garden,

You'd need to get your hands on

a semper augustus bulb.

That's the part of the tulip

that lives beneath the soil --

And planting a bulb

is the only way

To make sure a tulip offspring

Will look the same as

its parent.

But in 17th-century holland,

Semper augustus bulbs

were very scarce.

At that time,

only one merchant in amsterdam

Had examples of this bulb.

Eventually one man prevailed

upon him to sell a single bulb,

Which was valued at the time

at 10,000 florins.

This was at a time when

the average dutch worker

Would survive with his family

for a year on about 300.

And the fact that such sales

were being made

And for such colossal sums

of money

Gradually became

more widely known,

And this really was

the foundation stone

Of what became

the tulip mania.

At the height

of the tulip mania,

One tulip sold for an amount

equivalent to the price

Of one of the grandest

canal houses in amsterdam.

Now, just to put it

in contemporary terms,

This is equivalent to, say,

a townhouse on 5th avenue.

$10 million to $15 million

for a single tulip bulb.

The tulip bulb market

hit its peak in February 1637.

There were

40 million guilders' worth

Of tulip deals outstanding,

More than six times

the total amount of money

There was in circulation.

There was an auction

held in the winter of 1637,

And some great tulip was put on

the market at a certain price.

And it didn't get that price.

And the auctioneer offered

1,000 guilders less,

1,000 guilders

below that,

And nobody bid.

The flowers were

very overvalued.

People were risking fortunes,

And of course the whole thing

came crashing down at once.

And, so

very soon after that,

All these tulips

were worthless,

And all these people

were ruined.

They had put there fortunes

in these flowers,

And now they were worthless --

They were just bulbs of plants.

And that was the end

of the tulip mania.

Suddenly, the flower

that was loved for its beauty

Became a symbol

of human folly.

There was a period of

Tulip hatred in holland

after the collapse,

Because it was blamed for

this economic disaster.

There was a famous professor

in leiden

Who'd run around with a stick

beating tulips

And destroying them,

And there were all these

pamphlets and broadsides

About the evils

of the tulip mania

And the great

whore goddess flora

Who was blamed for

bringing the dutch down,

As if, you know, it was

the flower that did it to them.

It's an extraordinary

historical episode,

And we look back and we

look down, and we say,

"how could they do this?"

but of course we've been through

Our own speculative bubbles,

And it doesn't really matter

what you're trading --

As long as the price is going up

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