LAST weekend, I was standing in the scorching spring sunshine behind the church on Holy Island admiring the intense blocks of colour – vivid reds and yellows with flames of purple – of the season’s first tulips.

Then I returned to my desk to write a little piece for tomorrow’s Memories on Hornby Castle, a curious silhouette near Bedale once owned by the Conyers family, and my eye was caught by a claim that in the 1630s, the 4th Lord Conyers “was actively involved in financial speculation using tulip bulbs”.

This was tulipomania – an economic bubble that makes our Libor rate rigging scandal look very boring.

Tulips come from Turkey. The word “tulip” comes from the Persian “dulband” which means “turban”, the shape of the intense flower. The first tulip bulbs reached Europe in the 1550s; in the 1590s, it was discovered they could survive year-round in places like the Low Countries. This made the intense flowers very fashionable – every castle owner like Lord Conyers wanted the latest colours in his borders.

But a bulb took up to 12 years flower, and it could only be sold in the the post-flowering season of June to September. Plus, the most attractive flowers – the “bizarden” with flame-effect streaks in them – came from bulbs with a virus.

Suddenly, you had all Europe’s rich men chasing a rare commodity that took a long time to mature and had a big element of risk in what it would eventually look like. Traders, or jobbers, began speculating, promising to buy rare bulbs in the bulb-buying season, and then selling their promises on – it was a futures market.

In 1634, a bulb cost one guilder. By the end of 1636, it was worth 60 guilders – ten times the annual wage of a skilled worker. Anyone who had been to the 17th Century equivalent of Strikes’ garden centre and bought bulbs at the bottom of the market – or at least promised to buy bulbs – and sold them at the top would have made a large fortune.

Perhaps Lord Conyers had done just that. It is known that he bought some tulips to plant in “ye great square in my garden closet” at Hornby.

But in early 1637, the plague prevented traders from paying for their bulbs in the Dutch town of Haarlem and, suddenly, almost overnight, with no purchasers available, the price of tulips collapsed – each bulb was worth less than a guilder. Fortunes were lost, and the Low Countries were plunged into an economic depression that lasted several years.

All for the sake of a spring bulb – I’ll never look at a tulip in the same light again.

CONTINUING a horticultural theme, in this space two years ago I wrote about Danish Scurvy Grass – a grubby white flower that for millennia only grew in seaside salty environments. But in the mid-1980s, it discovered that the salt put on our winter roads was burning off other vegetation along dual carriageways and it suddenly colonised the bare patches. It sped from coast to country and became the fastest spreading plant of the last 50 years. Just this week it has started to bloom on the roadside saltburn strip and already around Darlington I’ve spotted drifts of it where it definitely wasn’t last year. Danish Scurvy Grass isn’t Danish or grass; it may cure scurvy if eaten in copious quantities, and it is everywhere.