photo: Keukenhof, Holland (1996) 
When it Started: It was hard to date with precision exactly when the bubble in Holland formed, but the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That’s when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price. - Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground, and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers.
Enter the Speculators: Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair, and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted “florists” who couldn’t have cared less. 
These men were speculators who, only days before, had been carpenters and weavers, woodcutters and glassblowers, smiths, cobblers, coffee grinders, farmers, tradesmen, peddler, clergymen, schoolmasters, lawyers … One burglar in Amsterdam pawned the tools of his trade so that he too could become a speculator in tulips.
The Bubble: Rushing to get in on the sure thing, these people sold their businesses, mortgaged their homes, and invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers. Predictably, the flood of fresh capital into the market drove prices to bracing new heights. In the space of a month the price of a red-and-yellow striped Gheel ende Root van Leyden leapt from 46 guilders to 515. A bulb of Switsers, a yellow tulip feathered with red, soared from 60 to 1,800 guilders!
Semper Augustus (left) was the intricately feathered red-and-white tulip one bulb of which changed hands for 10,000 guilders at the height of the mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam.
Every bubble sooner or later must burst:… In Holland, the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled – real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs – and the market grew jittery. 
On February 2, 1637, the florists of Haarlem gathered as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin bidding at 1,250 guilders… Finding no takers, he tried again at 1,100, then 1,000… and all at once every man in the room – men who days before had themselves paid comparable sums for comparable tulips – understood that the weather had changed. Haarlem was the capital of the bulb trade, and the news that there were no buyers to be found there ricocheted across the country. In all of Holland a greater fool was no longer to be found. 
The Lesson: In the aftermath, many Dutch blamed the flower for their folly, as if the tulips themselves had, like the sirens, lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin. … It bears remembering that tulipomania was finally a frenzy not of consumption or of pleasure but of financial speculation…
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