Autumn 1610

      John set sail in September, and experienced a rough and frightening crossing after waiting for four dull days off Gravesend for a southerly wind. He landed in Flushing and hired a large flat-bottomed canal boat so that he could stop at every farm and enquire what they had to sell, all the way down the canal to Delft. To his relief the canal boatman spoke English even though his accent was as strong as any Cornishman. The boat was drawn by an amiable sleepy horse which wandered along the tow path and grazed on the lush banks during John’s frequent halts. He found farmers of flowers whose whole trade consisted of nothing but the famous tulips, and whose whole fortune rested on being able to produce and then reproduce the new colours of blooms. They were farms like John had never seen before. Row upon row of floppy-leaved stalks were tended by women wearing huge wooden clogs against the rich sandy soil, and big white hats against the sun, working their way down the rows with an implement like a wooden spoon, gently lifting the smooth round bulbs from the ground and laying them softly down, and the cart coming along behind to gather them all up.

      John watched them. Each set of leaves which had grown from one bulb now had a cluster of three, perhaps even four, bulbs at the end of their white stems. Most of them even carried fat buds at the head where the petals had been and when the women spotted them, and they never missed one however long he watched, they cut them off and popped them in their apron pockets. Where one valuable bulb had been set in the ground and flowered there were now four, and maybe three dozen seeds as well. A man could quadruple his investment in one year for no more labour than keeping the field free of weeds and digging up his capital in the autumn.

      ‘Profitable business,’ John remarked enviously under his breath, thinking of the price he paid for tulips in England.

      At every canalside market town he had the boatman tie up and wait for him on board, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, as he wandered around the market gardens and picked out a well-shaped tree, a sack of common bulbs, a purse full of seeds. Wherever he could, he bought in bulk, haunted by the thought of the rich green commonland and meadows around Hatfield waiting for forests and plantations and mazes and orchards. Wherever he could find someone who could speak English and had the appearance of an honourable man, he made a contract with him to send on more plants to England as they matured.

      ‘A great planting scheme,’ one of the Dutch farmers commented.

      John smiled but his forehead was creased with worry. ‘The greatest,’ he said.

      Despite his rooted belief that Englishmen were the best of the world, and England undeniably the best country, John could not help but be impressed with the labour these people had put into their land. Each canal bank was maintained as smartly as each town doorstep. They took a pleasure and a pride in things being just so. And their rewards were towns which exuded wealth and a land which was interlaced with an efficient transport system that put the potholed roads of England to shame.

      The dykes that held back the shifting sands and the high waves of the North Sea were a wonder to John, who had seen the feckless neglect of the marshes and waterlogged estuaries of the Fens and East Anglia. He had not thought it was possible to do anything with land soured by salt, but he saw the Dutch farmers had learned the way of it and were making use of land that an Englishman would call waste ground and abandon it as hopeless. John thought of the harbours and inlets and boggy places all around the coast, even in land-hungry Kent and Essex, and how in England they were left to lie fallow, steeped in salt, whereas in Holland they were banked off from the sea and growing green.

      He could not help but admire their labour and their skill, and he could not help but envy the Dutch prosperity. There was no hunger in the Holland Provinces, and basic fare was rich and good. They ate cheese on buttered bread, a double helping of richness and fat, and did not think twice about it. Their cows grazed knee-deep in lush wet pastureland and gave abundant milk. They were a people who saw themselves as divinely rewarded for their struggle against the Papist Spanish, and John, idling down the narrow canals, looking left and right for plants and flowers tucked away in the moist grasses, had to agree that the Protestant God was a generous one to this, His favoured people.

      When they reached The Hague, Tradescant sent the loaded barge back with instructions to ship all the plants directly to England. He stood on the stone wharf and watched the swaying heads of trees glide slowly away. Some of the cherry trees were bearing fruit and he saw, with irritation, that once they were beyond hailing distance the bargee picked a handful and ate them, spitting the stones carelessly into the glassy water of the canal.

      In Flanders he bought vines, and watched them pruned of their yellow leaves and thick black grapes in preparation for their journey. He ordered their roots to be wrapped in damp sacking and plunged into old wine casks for their voyage home. He sent a message ahead of them, in the careful script which Elizabeth had taught him, so that a gardener from Hatfield would meet them with a cart on the dockside, to take them back and heel them in the same day, without fail, making sure to water them religiously at dawn every day until Tradescant came home.

      The Prince of Orange’s gardener admitted Tradescant to the beautiful garden behind the palace of The Hague and showed him around. It was a garden in the grand European style, with large stone colonnades and broad sweeping walks. Tradescant spoke to him of his work at Theobalds, planting between the box hedges and replacing the coloured stones of the knot garden with lavender. The gardener nodded with enthusiasm and showed Tradescant his version of the changing style in a little garden at the side of the palace where he had used tidily pruned lavender for the hedges themselves. They made a softer pattern and had more variation of colour than the usual box hedge. They did not harbour insects and when a woman passed by, her skirts brushed against the leaves and released a cloud of perfume. When he left, Tradescant had a trayful of rooted cuttings and a letter of introduction to the great physic garden at Leiden.

      He travelled overland to Rotterdam, uncomfortable on a big broad-backed horse, all the way seeking out English-speaking farmers who could tell him about the growing of their precious tulips. In the darkened cellars of ale houses, drinking a rich sweet beer which was new to John, called ‘thick beer’, they swore that the new colours entered into the heart of the flowers by slicing into the very heart of the bulb.

      ‘Does it not weaken them?’ John asked.

      The men shook their heads. ‘It helps them to split,’ one of them volunteered. He leaned forward and breathed a blast of raw onion into John’s face. ‘To spawn. And then what do you have?’

      John shook his head.

      ‘Two, where you had one before! If they are of another colour, and the colour often enters at the split, then you have made a fortune a thousand times over. But if they are the same colour but have doubled, then you have doubled your fortune at the least.’

      John nodded. ‘It is like a miracle,’ he said. ‘You cannot help but double your fortune every year.’

      The man sat back in his seat and beamed. ‘And it’s more than double,’ he confirmed. ‘The prices are steadily rising. People are ready to pay more and more each year.’ He scratched his broad belly with quiet satisfaction. ‘I shall have a handsome house in Amsterdam before I retire,’ he predicted. ‘And all from my tulips.’

      ‘I shall buy from you,’ John promised.

      ‘You have to come to the auction,’ the man said firmly. ‘I don’t sell privately. You will have to bid against the others.’

      John hesitated. An auction in a foreign country in a language he did not understand was almost bound to drive up the price. One of the other growers leaned forward.

      ‘You have to,’ he said simply. ‘The market for tulips is all agreed. It has to be done in the colleges, in the appointed way. You cannot buy without posting a bid. That way we all know how much is being made on each colour.’

      ‘I