To-day the Dutch make more of a serious business of bulb raising, and the rather inconspicuous offshoot has become a recognized article of trade and commerce. Almost all of the 2,000 Dutch varieties of tulips have been developed by patient and thoughtful culture from the Tulipa Gesneriana, which Conrad Gesner purchased in Constantinople and brought to Augsburg in Germany in 1559.
In Holland the tulip is propagated both from the seed and from the offshoots of the bulb. The offshoots may be expected to reproduce their true variety as to colorings and markings, growing to a flowering size in three or four years. Seedlings, on the other hand, are less vain and more reticent. No matter what the complexions of their parents might have been, the first flowers of a seedling, appearing after it has had four or five years’ growth, are of a single color. A tulip in such a state is called a “breeder,” and remains so until, after several years, its flower suddenly “breaks” into the gorgeous colors of the “flamed” or the “feathered” tulip. It is then classified according to color and variety and placed upon the market. To hasten this period of “breaking” in the career of the tulip—for no man can compute with any degree of certainty the year in which it will take place—the growers resort to various means, even sending the bulbs away sometimes for a change of climate. “Breeders” that have taken on the desired markings and colors are said to have become “rectified.” But the problem of chance that the seedling tulips will “break” into a new variety is one that the Dutch have been pondering over for centuries, and, as has already been said, they have been rewarded to the extent of 2,000 varieties. Much care is devoted to the preparation of the soil and, after fertilizing thoroughly, the grower will first plant it with potatoes for a couple of years in order to diminish its strength and adapt it better to the cultivation of tulips. The bulbs are taken up each summer, their offshoots detached, and then replaced in fresh soil.
Inside the Groote Kerk in Haarlem, showing its organ, which was long considered one of the greatest in the world
The year before the siege of Leyden, Haarlem suffered a siege under Frederic of Toledo, the son of the Spaniard, Alva; but Haarlem was not so fortunate as her sister city. After bravely maintaining the place against the enemy for a period of seven weary months, with odds of seven to one against them, the Prince of Orange, with heavy heart, sent a message asking the commandant to make the best terms he would with the Spaniards and surrender, the many attempts of the Prince to rescue the city having proved futile.
The massacre that followed the surrender was too shocking to bear the telling of in detail. The garrison and its commandant, the Protestant clergy, and 2,000 or more burghers were cruelly butchered by the Spaniards. Alva himself, however, was forced to admit to Philip that “never was a place defended with such skill and bravery as Haarlem”; not only the men of the town, little accustomed to arms, but the women also had taken an active part in Haarlem’s defense, and Kenau Hasselaer, “a widow of distinguished family and unblemished reputation, about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her amazons” (some three hundred or more) “participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the siege, both within and without the walls.”
As the birthplace of a number of Holland’s celebrated painters, including Franz Hals and Jacob van Ruysdael, Haarlem holds as her most cherished possession a handsome percentage of the works of the former, numbering among which are his ten famous corporation and regent canvases, arranged in chronological order in the museum of the old Town Hall. To know these will mean that you know the jovial Franz.
Across the market place from the Town Hall rises the Groote Kerk, and, just beside it, the old meat market, erected in 1602, and said, by those who know, to be the quaintest brick and stone Renaissance building in the Netherlands. The Groote Kerk is of a graceful cruciform shape and around the edges of its buttresses, like chicks peeping from under the protecting wings of the mother hen, are built a number of curious little one-story houses whose interiors suggest the last word in coziness and cleanliness, and where the much maligned Dutch decorative taste may be seen at its best. The church contains what was long considered the largest and loudest pipe organ in the world, possessing three keyboards, sixty stops, and 5,000 pipes of varying lengths and diameters up to thirty-two feet in the case of the former and fifteen inches with respect to the latter. A cannon ball, imbedded in the wall of the south aisle of the church, was allowed to remain undisturbed during the restoration as a reminiscence of the siege of 1572.
At the side of the church, in the market place, stands a bronze statue of a Dutchman of the name of Coster, erected in 1856 upon rather fictitious evidence of his having been the inventor of printing. Nothing in the way of printed matter having been proven to have been done by Coster prior to or even shortly after 1447, when Gutenburg of Mayence developed the art, the palm for this distinction was finally, but reluctantly, relegated to the latter.
Instead of Spanish encampments, Haarlem is now surrounded with a beautiful forest, a prominent collection of attractive residences, municipal playgrounds for the children, and lives in an atmosphere of peace and comfort. The old Amsterdam Gate at the east end of the city serves as the only reminder that the place at one time possessed strong fortifications.