During the four days of next week’s Chelsea Flower Show (23-26 May) the organisers expect to see around 170,000 visitors. Nevertheless it must be said that the love of flowers is not what it used to be.

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase of Flowers in a Niche is a small (64 by 46cm) but uniquely transparent window on to a long-lost world of floral obsession. It was painted in 1620, when many now common-or-garden flowers such as tulips, hyacinths, anenomes and fritillaries were still exotic newcomers to Western Europe. Bosschaert shows us what some of the earliest European specimens of those flowers looked like. Just beneath the uncannily still surface of his picture we can, perhaps, sense the trembling excitement which their unfamiliar beauty once aroused.

In Holland, where Bosschaert lived and worked, the enthusiasm for exotic flowers was particularly strong. The tulip was imported by the botanist Carolus Clusius, who grew numerous varieties in his garden in Leiden, but its dissemination throughout the country is said to have been brought about by thieves who climbed over the fence one night and stole all his best bulbs. This was the first harbinger of what came to be known as the Dutch “tulipomania”, which the historian Simon Schama calls “the first great speculation crisis of modern capitalism”. At the height of this singular craze, the price of a single “Semper Augustus” bulb – producing a white flower flamed with red stripes, like the one in the bottom left of Bosschaert’s bouquet – rose to 13,000 guilders. To put that in perspective, a contemporary writer calculated that for a mere 2,500 guilders one could buy twenty-seven tons of wheat, fifty tons of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat pigs, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tons of butter, three tons of cheese, a bed with linen, a wardrobe of clothes and a silver beaker.

Small wonder then that Bosschaert presents his precious blooms not as any ordinary bunch of flowers but as an alien, thrilling spectacle, a marvel of botanical variety – and a small fortune to boot. Each rare specimen has been depicted with minute attention to detail, none masking another. They have been placed in a highly wrought vase of mannerist design, on a stone niche overlooking a landscape of impossibly romantic beauty and extent.

 

It is appropriate that Bosschaert’s picture should have the character of a vision, since he could never have seen what he painted. During his lifetime it was unheard of to put flowers such as these in vases. They were far too precious to be picked. The picture is a composite image formed, collage-like, from many separate studies of individual flowers, which explains the uneasy perspective of the bouquet, the ever-so-slightly Cubist sense of a different point of view having been adopted for each bloom. Bosschaert’s fellow painter and contemporary Jan Bruegel wrote about hunting high and low for rare plants in the gardens of the extremely rich, and securing permission to paint them. Bosschaert must have worked in much the same way. The technique had the advantage of allowing him to combine flowers, such as narcissi and roses, which blossom at different times of the year, which was doubtless a selling point. The artist could never offer his patron anything more than a simulacrum of the flowers he cherished – a mere image, without sap or scent – so he worked hard to compensate for the inadequacy.

Tulipomania ended badly. Spiralling speculation in tulip bulb futures tempted people from all walks of life and by early 1637 Holland was full of deluded paper millionaires. Before the inevitable crash it is said that lowly ship’s carpenters and humble tailors were ordering gilded carriages and having themselves shown around great country estates with a view to buy. Thousands were ruined while moralists throughout Europe had a field day. By the mid-seventeenth century (according to the OED) the English word “tulip” had acquired a secondary metaphorical meaning: “a showy person or thing”.

Why should the flames of the tulip have drawn so many, moth-like, to their own destruction? Bosschaert’s picture contains clues. The vastness of the landscape behind the vase is not just pretty, but significant. Reminiscent of the fantastic landscapes painted by Leonardo da Vinci (and Bosschaert’s picture is surely the Mona Lisa of flower paintings) it stands for the greater world from all corners of which these flowers have been transported. Ever since the Renaissance, an obsession with being at the forefront of knowledge and exploration had developed among the crowned heads and nobility of Europe. To know the most, to have reached the furthest and the deepest into the world that lay over the horizon – that, in an age when nascent imperialism went hand-in-hand with accelerating scientific innovation, was synonymous with being the most powerful.

Exotic flowers, like the shells from the East and West Indies also included in Bosschaert’s painting, visibly demonstrated the growth of one’s influence and knowledge. These were things that kings and princes collected. It is not difficult to imagine Vase of Flowers in a Niche hanging in a royal Wunderkammer, or cabinet of natural curiosities. It may well have been painted for Bosschaert’s most illustrious patron, the Prince of Orange. A whiff of the centuries-old association between regal power and rare plants hangs over the Chelsea Flower Show, which has always had the seal of royal approval. Its current patron is the Queen Mother.