What flowers really said

We live in an era of hi- tech revenge. Nowadays, a dumped girlfriend can seek retribution by connecting her ex-boyfriend's phone to the speaking clock in Tokyo and leaving it off the hook for a month, or arranging for barnyard animal porn to be sent anonymously to his email address at work, but I think there's still something far more satisfying about traditional low-tech acts of vengeance, like the one I read about a few years ago.

Apparently, a municipal gardener had been sacked for interfering with the park officer's wife's clematis (or some such misdemeanour), but was unwisely ordered to work out his three months' notice first. He did so without complaint, and (with surprising alacrity) spent every waking hour quietly planting thousands of bulbs in the flowerbeds, so that next spring (long after he'd left town), the entire park was suddenly ablaze with floral graffiti, with daffodils spelling out precise details of the officer's more exotic sexual preferences, while the tulips suggested he should do something anatomically impossible with his own spade.

The symbolism in 17th-century floral art from the Netherlands was generally a little more subtle than that, but as last night's Painting Flowers (BBC4) revealed, the message could be just as damning. Dutch Masters like Balthazar Van Der Ast, Jan Van Huysum, and Hertz Van Rental (okay, that last one might be a fake) regularly said it with flowers in their finest works, sometimes using the tulip as a symbol of man's highest spiritual aspirations, but more frequently intending it to satirise his greed, folly, and ultimate financial ruin.

That was something with which presenter Monty Don could empathise, I suppose, because he's not only a keen gardener, but also went public a few years ago over his own spot of depression-related financial trouble. Indeed, I even wrote him a sympathetic letter at the time, suggesting that "you should get a job cutting the grass at your local cemetery, so you can tell everyone you're still in business and have 500 people under you at work". Strangely, I never got a reply.

Although he's yet another presenter who cannot walk and talk without apparently conducting an invisible orchestra at the same time, Monty could otherwise have been mistaken for a Don as he gave an authoritative lecture that combined botany and economics with art history.

Like a horticultural Lord Clark, he traced the tulip's introduction into European civilisation to an Austrian ambassador who'd brought some bulbs home from Istanbul in 1556, although it wasn't until the 1590s that Carolus Clusius began cultivating them seriously at the University of Leiden.

NOWADAYS the Dutch grow three billion bulbs each year, and an aerial shot of a gigantic modern tulip field was as symmetrical as a Mondrian, but they were scarce back in the early 17th century, and each flower was so precious that it was cheaper to ask an artist to paint a vaseful than to grow them yourself. "One single bulb was worth, literally, its weight in gold," declared Mr Don, resorting to a cliché that was, sadly, only worth its weight in lead.

The astonishing attention to detail in these "Vanitas" paintings (illustrating the transient nature of earthly beauty) was neatly matched by the programme's own visual language.

Meticulous lighting and rostrum work highlighted the delicacy of each leaf and petal (especially in Bosschaert's astoundingly vivid paintings on copper), while each name caption was ushered in by an evanescent puff of smoke, although the bland minimalist soundtrack that accompanied the pictures sounded disappointingly like an unfocused afterthought, hastily selected from the dubbing editor's personal CD collection.

The climax of the programme revisited the bizarre story of the Tulipmania epidemic of 1637, when the entire Dutch nation temporarily took leave of its economic senses, with individual tulip bulbs briefly becoming more valuable than entire town houses, until the inevitable crash happened.