TULIPS
One day short of St. Valentine’s (when Nature still takes the liberties which men used to allow themselves) I am able to announce tulips in bud in the open border, which is as much of a record as my crocuses were on the 18th of January. I don’t speak of a sheltered or fruitful valley by any means. What they may be doing with flowers at Wilton and Wilsford has no more relation to me than their goings-on at Torquay or Grange-over-Sands. Up this way, for reasons which it would be tedious to report, the spring comes slowly—as a rule. This year is like no other that I can remember, as no doubt the reckoning will be.
I know what tulip it is. There is only one which would be so heedlessly daring. It is that noble wild Tuscan flower which the people of the Mugello and thereabouts call Occhio del Sole, which has a sage green leaf, a long flower-stalk of maroon, and atop of that a great chalice of geranium red with yellow base and a black blotch in the midst. Looking into the depths from above there is the appearance of a lurid eye. But its real name is Praecox, and Parkinson says that it flowers in January. I don’t believe him. I have had it for years, and never saw it before mid-March. Parkinson is vague about tulips, classing them mostly by colour and inordinate names of his own. You may have the Crimson Prince, or Bracklar; or the Brancion Prince; or a Duke, “that is more or less faire deep red, with greater or lesser yellow edges, and a great yellow bottome.” Then there is a Testament Brancion, or a Brancion Duke; and lastly The King’s Flower, “that is, a crimson or bloud red, streamed with a gold yellow”—which ought to look indifferent well at Buckingham Palace. Praecox used to grow freely in the hill country above Fiesole, always on cultivated ground; and I have found lots of it in the poderi of Settignano, not so much as of the ordinary blood red, a smaller and meaner flower altogether; but enough to make a walk under the olives in very early Spring an enchantment. Ages ago Mrs. Ross sent me a hamper of them, which has lasted me ever since; for this tulip increases freely, and is invaluable as the first of its family.
The next to appear will be the little Persian violacea, with its crinkled wavy leaves flatlings, and the pointed bud, which gives a rose-coloured flower when open, slightly retroflexed, enough so, at least, to make it plain that the familiar ornament of Persian and Rhodian tiles was adapted from it. I always thought its name was persica; but Weathers, I see, makes that a bronze flower, and names violacea as the earliest of all the Persians, which mine certainly is. So that, as they say, is that. I find it happiest among rocks, as all bulbs, except lilies, are if they can get there. How else secure the baking in summer which is so necessary? A pretty thing it is, in short, charming to discover for yourself in a corner of a man’s rock-garden, all the more so as you will make your discovery at a season when you least expect tulips; but there is nothing of a “sudden glory” to be had from it. Nobody could be knocked off his æsthetic perch by a Persian tulip, still less off his moral perch. I have known that done by one of the Caucasian tulips—it led to swift and stealthy work with a penknife at Kew. But that was a long time ago, and the delinquent can never do it again, for a final reason.
The loveliest tulip in the world—I speak only of natural flowers, not of nurserymen’s monsters—is, in my opinion, the little Bandiera di Toscana, the sword-leaved, sanguine-edged thing with the narrow bud of red and white, which opens in the sun to be a milky star. It is the loveliest, alike in colour and in habit, but one of the most fastidious. Short of lifting it, which the true gardener disdains to do, there is no certainty that it will spring up again when the time comes round. Your best chance is on rocks, I daresay; and I have succeeded with it in a border under a south wall with a pent of thatch over. It does not like frost, and abominates rain at the wrong time of year. It clings, in fact, to its Mediterranean habits, which some things contentedly lose—Iris stylosa, for instance, which flowers here better in November than it does in April. I have my clusianas—for that is their proper name—now in a terraced border, full south, under clumps of mossy saxifrage, and they do as well as can be expected. They return with the swallows, and open wide to the sun; but I am not going to pretend that they ramp. If I could afford it I would put them in a place where they could take their chance of the spade; for there is this to be said of all the Florentine tulips that, although they are not designedly lifted, they grow in a country where every square yard of ground is cultivated, and consequently are turned over by the plough of the spade every year—no doubt to their vast benefit. But you must not mind how many of them you slice, or bury upside down, or leave above ground at that work—and I do mind.
The truly marvellous Greigi is just showing itself: no increase there, I am sorry to say. Weathers says that it “reproduces itself freely.” Not here, O Apollo. I cannot make any Caucasian tulips have families; they are resolute Malthusians; nevertheless, I shall have my few bubbles of scarlet as before, and before they have done with me they will be as large as claret-glasses, on short stems, which are the best kind of claret-glasses. I could do with a hundred of them, but I don’t know what to give them that I have not given. They grow on limestone at home, and I give them limestone. They are never disturbed in the Caucasus, and I never disturb them. It is my distance from the equator that beats me. So I must be content with my three or four—only I shan’t boast of them to ladies from Aix-les-Bains. A tulip, by the way, which I covet, but have not so far been able to obtain, is called, I think, saxatilis. It has rather a sprawly growth, but several flowers on the stalk, and is sweetly scented. In colour it is faint and indeterminate; flushes of mauve, white and yellow. Several nurserymen offer me bulbs by that name, some have induced me to buy them; but it has never been the right thing. I may be wrong, or they may be: I must ask an expert. It may be priceless, in which case I shan’t have it. I bought some Peruvian pseudo-crocus once, of a marvellous blue indeed—not a gentian, but a kingfisher blue—at seven and sixpence per bulb, and the mice, mistaking it for a real crocus, ate them all. “These are my crosses, Mr. Wesley.” But, if we are talking about money, Mrs. Ross gave me a tulip once which was worth, so she told me, twenty pounds. Certainly it was very handsome, a tall Darwin of bronze feathered with gold: called Buonarroti. It was prolific, and in no short time filled the border in which it grew. If its sons had been worthy of their sire there might have been hundreds of pounds’ worth of them, all growing naked in the open air. But I observed that they grew paler year by year; and when I returned to the garden after a five years’ absence I could not believe that I had ever planted such a bilious tulip. My grand old Occhi del Sole, on the other hand, were as vivid as ever.
I have never possessed the so-called native English tulip, whose botanical name is silvestris; but I have seen it. I know where it grows, and blows, and could take you to the place—only I shall not. My father found it by chance, and brought a flower of it home in high feather. He found it, truly enough, in a wood, so its name describes its habits. Now, I inquire, is it an indigenous plant? It is what I doubt. If it is, it must have existed from all time; the Iberians must have grown it on their lenches, or found it lower down, in the jungle. Yet it is unknown to the poets; and the word “tulip,” remark, is a Turkish word disguised. Parkinson knows nothing of Tulipa silvestris. Far more probably it came from the South, in the maw of some straying bird—perhaps a hoopoo, or the hold of an adventuring ship. That was how we became possessed of the wild peony which is, or was, to be found on an island in the Severn Sea. Who is to say how that happened? Perhaps Spanish sailors had a peony growing in the after-cabin to Our Lady of Seven Dolours, and were shipwrecked with her and it on the strand of Lundy. How did two ilexes come to be growing out of the Guinigi tower at Lucca? How did a fig-tree find itself in the middle arch of the bridge at Cordova? There are more ways of accounting for a wild tulip in Kent than by imagining that God Almighty bade it grow there.
I have left myself no room in which to treat of nurserymen’s tulips, and the less the pity in that they can talk of them so eloquently themselves. There is a Dutch grower who simply wallows in adjectives about them every year. He photographs his children, smiling like anything, up to the neck in tulips; he poses with his arms full of them before his wife, like an Angel of the Annunciation. As for his words, they come bubbling from him as they used from Mr. Swinburne when he saw a baby. It is true that, like the talk about them, they get taller every year. They are less flowers than portents, and the only thing to do with them is to treat them as so much colour, turning your garden for the time being into a Regent Street shop-window. Brown wallflower and La Rêve look well, so do yellow wallflower and Othello. Last year I tried Clara Butt and Cheiranthus allionii, and had a show like Mr. Granville Barker’s Twelfth Night. Rose pink and orange is not everybody’s mixture.