Every one in Scilly was kept hard at work from morning to night, and even so it was impossible to keep pace with the flowers. Usually, as I have said, they are picked in bud to save them from sudden storms, and put in water in the glass-houses, where they will open under better protection and more quickly than out of doors. But this month of March they opened faster than they could be picked. It was a race between the animal kingdom and the vegetable; and the vegetable won! Wallflowers also were coming on apace, and had to be neglected until the masses of daffodils and narcissi had been attended to.
This exceptional crop was attributed to the warm, dry summer of the year before, which had ripened the bulbs to perfection, and made the fields thus bring forth “an hundredfold.” Bad weather kept back or spoilt the earlier flowers, and so complicated matters by concentrating the bulk of the work for the season more than ever into two short months.
Three times a week at the height of the harvest, fifty tons of flowers were leaving St. Mary’s Quay for Penzance, en route for London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and other of our large cities. Fifty tons! That means, roughly speaking, three and a half million blossoms; and so we may reckon that at least one and a half million of flowers were being picked in Scilly every day!
And yet the islands did not look despoiled. Far from it. The fields were a glorious sight, sheets and waves of silver and gold, representing to their owners the silver and gold of hard cash.
But such a wealth and abundance of flowers is of less advantage to the grower than to the purchaser. So many tons poured into the market in the course of a single week bring down prices with a run. “More than double the usual crop and less than half the usual price” is not a satisfactory state of affairs, for there are all the expenses of picking, tying, and carriage to be considered; and the cost of sending to London is no trifle—something like £6 a ton. An additional charge is the 10s. per ton which is paid to the Governor on all flowers that leave the islands, to recoup him for the lengthening of the pier twenty years ago. Prices were so reduced that the narcissus Soleil d’Or would only fetch 2s. for 36 bunches, when the year before they had been 5s. 6d., and Princeps had fallen to the same price from 4s. 6d.
A COTTAGE FLOWER-GROWER, TRESCO
But what a year it was for seeing the fields! I must say it again even if you are tired of hearing it. You must not imagine squares of flowers, flat as pancakes, prim and orderly and uninviting such as you see in Holland. In Scilly no two fields are alike, and it is difficult to find one that is flat and uninteresting. They cover the slopes facing to the west and south; very often they run down almost to the edge of the sea, with only a low stone hedge to divide them from the shore. What would Wordsworth have felt, I wonder, to see these waves of dancing daffodils? Perhaps he would have preferred the scattered groups and clusters that spring up of themselves in the hedges by the wayside, or even on the beach itself.
For the wise Scillonian soon discovers which of his bulbs are the best and most profitable; and, weeding out from his fields those that promise least, he “heaves them to cliff,” where, if they light on any sort of soil, and out of reach of the waves, they will blossom even at the water’s edge, till some unusually high tide washes them away. In the meantime they delight the eye of the passer-by with unexpected splashes of gold, drops from the gorgeous seas that cover the island-flanks.