Tulip mania invested in tulip strains, not tulip flowers.
Flowers are a decaying, regrowing resource for consumption and as such a good business.
A currency that decays on one end and regrows on the other end btw would make for an ideal currency.
Silvio Gesell's "free money" would pretty much fit the bill as per his book The Natural Economic Order or the movie Shillings from Heaven.