Dancing through history

With their intense hues and breathtaking feathers and flames, heritage tulips continue to delight gardeners to this day

- Carolle Doyle

FOR ONE day in May Primrose Hall on the outskirts of Wakefield is given over to the Wakefield & North of England Tulip Society (WNETS). Go along from 2.30pm until 3.30pm when members of the public are admitted and you will see trestle tables filled with row upon row of brown beer bottles, each sporting a single tulip in one of the three colours recognised by the Society. They go by the antique names of Rose', 'Bybloemen' and 'Bizarre' in their respective shades of pink, lavender and a shade that is somewhere between the colour of a Tudor brick and gingerbread.

Here you will see these solidly coloured 'breeder tulips' with open, chalice-like heads sitting alongside their 'rectified' offspring broken by a virus that paints the tulips with flames and feathers of such beauty that it will catch you by the throat and make you gasp.

Rose breaks into scarlet flames on a parchment-white ground while Bybloemen bears feathers and flames of imperial purple on its white petals and, most fantastic of all, Bizarre might have been dipped in lacquer to better show off its flames the colour of newly opened horse chestnuts against a yellow as glossy as the petals of buttercups.

These are the descendants of tulips that were once so prized in Holland that a single bulb could fetch the same price as a town house in Amsterdam. Some might say it was a time when the Dutch went a little mad.

For three years from 1634 to 1637 the country was in the grip of 'tulipomania' and when the bubble of wild speculation broke, those who had invested in these beguiling blooms were ruined.