In late October, Daylight Savings Time ends; we reset our internal and external clocks, and gain a much-needed hour of sleep. In the United States, we’ve been engaging in this seasonal ritual for so long that almost no one finds it ironic that the majority of us have to literally turn back time before we can go forward into late fall and winter.
I went back one hundred years the other day, and the phenomenon had nothing to do with clocks. I was planting bulbs at a good clip when an antique tulip variety called ‘Beauty of Bath’ sparked a trip to the past that lasted for several hours. While immersing myself in the delights of 1906, I discovered that ‘Beauty of Bath’, like many other celebrated females, has quite a past.
The plump, shapely bulbs came to me from Old House Gardens , an heirloom bulb business run by landscape historian Scott Kunst. Scott’s supply of ‘Beauty of Bath’ came from Hortus Bulborum, a unique Dutch garden, nursery and living museum dedicated to preserving heirloom bulbs. Founded in 1928 by Pieter Boschman, a school principal with a large historic bulb collection, Hortus Bulborum has developed over the years into a repository of over 2500 historic, unusual or commercially unavailable varieties of tulips, daffodils and other bulbs. In addition to preserving horticultural treasures, Hortus Bulborum plays an important modern role, safeguarding biodiversity by serving as a pollen bank for modern bulb growers. Scott Kunst describes Hortus Bulborum as the “Noah’s Ark of historic bulbs.”
‘Beauty of Bath ‘ is one of those souvenirs of the past. It was introduced in 1906 by W.T. Ware, a well-known English tulip grower, whose nursery was at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, on the country’s eastern side. Ware was also credited with introducing the hardy, long-stemmed Darwin tulip to his area a year earlier, in 1905.
‘Beauty’ is a “broken” variety, a description that characterizes the flowers’ markings, not the plant’s condition. Opening with yellow petals characteristically flamed and feathered with rosy purple, the flowers age to purple and white. The parent plant may have been found in an old garden in Bath .
“Broken” tulips like ‘Beauty of Bath’ owe their brilliant flames, feathers and other markings to a virus that is spread by aphids. These tulips were so popular in seventeenth century Holland that speculators bought and sold the bulbs for enormous sums, often while those bulbs were still in the ground. The “tulipomania” bubble eventually burst, but the vogue for “broken” tulips continued for another two centuries. In the twentieth century the Dutch developed the modern-day Rembrandt-type tulips, whose appearance is reminiscent of the old “broken” varieties, but lacks much of the beauty and drama of the originals. While ‘Beauty of Bath’ does not go back to “tulipomania” times, it is the same kind of tulip that enchanted the Dutch almost four hundred years ago.
‘Beauty of Bath ‘ may well have gotten its name from the place where it was found, but there is another, intriguing possibility. In March 1906, successful English stage producer, Seymour Hicks, presented a new musical comedy at London ‘s Aldwych Theater. Its star was Ellaline Terriss, a leading actress who was also Hicks’ wife. The music was composed by a young, relatively unknown American named Jerome Kern, who went on to great fame as the composer of standards like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and the much admired musical, “Showboat”. The song lyrics were written by a slightly older English journalist and author named P.G. Wodehouse, who remains well-known for his “Jeeves and Wooster “ stories. The show was “The Beauty of Bath,” and it had a very respectable run of 287 performances in the West End .
It might be a coincidence that ‘Beauty of Bath’ the tulip, and the musical, “The Beauty of Bath” both premiered in the spring of 1906. Then again it might not. Plant breeders have long named new varieties after celebrated actresses, singers, plays and operas. Old House Gardens carries ‘Clara Butt’, a once-popular pink Darwin tulip named after an equally celebrated English actress of the late nineteenth century.
Of course in 1906 ‘Beauty of Bath’ was also a popular apple variety. Good for eating and cider making, the edible ‘Beauty’ was developed near Bath and introduced in 1864. It’s likely that both W.T. Ware and Seymour Hicks were familiar with this particular apple.
So, does the tulip owe its name to an apple, a musical or the fact that someone discovered it in a Bath garden? The answer is waiting somewhere out there, and it will almost certainly take a few more trips back to Edwardian England to find it. My passport is waiting–in a bag of heirloom bulbs.
Old House Gardens –Heirloom Bulbs sells a wide range of intriguing antique varieties, as well as a book on the Hortus Bulborum. Find Old House Gardens at 536 Third St. , Ann Arbor , MI 48103, Phone (734) 995-1486, www.oldhousegardens.com. Catalog $2.00.