SCENE IN HAARLEM
HOLLAND
Tulips and Windmills
FIVE
Spring is the best time to visit Haarlem in Holland. The traveler to this city passes through wonderful fields covered with broad sheets of scarlet, white, and yellow tulips. It is a sight never to be forgotten. But, beautiful as the tulips are, it is not for this that the Hollanders grow them in such quantities. They grow the bulb not for the flower but for the “onion,” as it is called.
The cultivation of tulips is a great business in Holland; but today only a small percentage of the population commercialize the flower, compared to the number that cultivated it in the seventeenth century. The tulipomania of that time was really a form of gambling, in which admiration of the flower and interest in its culture were secondary matters. In those days thousands of florins were paid for a single bulb.
Tulips grow wild along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and in Africa and the Far East. They were introduced into the Low Countries in the sixteenth century from Constantinople and the Levant. Owing to their great beauty the flowers became immediate favorites in European gardens. It was in 1637 that the extraordinary tulipomania first took possession of the Dutch. Not only were flower merchants seized with it, but almost every citizen took up tulip growing. A single bulb called the “Semper Augustus” was sold for thirteen thousand florins, and for another of the same variety was traded “a new carriage, a pair of gray horses, and forty-six hundred guilders.” A prize of one hundred thousand florins offered by the horticultural society at Haarlem was won by the black tulip of Cornelius van Baerle. But when the government stepped in and enforced a law against gambling the price of tulips fell to nothing. The bubble burst, and thousands of dealers were beggared in a single night.
There is an old Dutch proverb which says, “God made the sea; but we make the shore.” For hundreds of years the Hollanders have proved this true by literally making the land upon which they live. They must continually fight against the encroachment of the sea, and a big factor in the work of keeping the ocean out is done by great windmills, which pump the water from the fields into the rivers and canals, and thus drain the land.