They show among the women not less than the men. The pride, at least of the more old-fashioned Dutch housewife, is her stove, the closed stoves, which heat the room very well and very cleanly, give little assistance to ventilation, and offer none of the cheer and sympathy of the open fire. I have only met or heard of one English housewife who was proud of a shining stove, and she lived in the Potteries, and was the wife of a cheerful drunkard. In summer the majority of the stoves in Dutch houses are taken down and put away—one would like to know where. They must require room to store, and present an interesting sight, wrapped in winding-sheets of greased paper, keeping their summer Sabbath, like the dead kings waiting the summons of Charlemagne’s sword. But the finest and most handsome of stoves are not taken down, they remain in place through the summer, covered when the weather is damp and when the room they adorn is not to be occupied; on no account to be used for fire—standing as a testimony to the owner’s housewifery and an impressive object to the visitor. One visitor, at least, was impressed by such a shining steel tower, impressed with the amount of elbow-grease required to keep it in order, if nothing else; though that same visitor had the bad taste to admire far more an old stove, exhibited with similar pride, by the host of a little inn on a remote Swiss road—a wonderful stone stove, with the date 1700 cut into it, and a history as interesting as would be the experiment (for the uninitiated) of lighting a fire there. A stove, that, to burn compromising papers, to destroy blood-stained garments and traces of crime, while the storm thundered without, as it did that day. The Dutch stoves, no doubt infinitely better fitted for combustion and real destruction of such things, or any other, make no such suggestions. They suggest, besides the pride of housewives and the pains of maid-servants, merely the useful heating apparatus of a comfortable home, where, when the short days draw in and the lamp is lighted, the family sit about the table and read and work—do crochet work and study the foreign classics. Or perhaps examine pollen and plant parasites with a microscope; or play very sweetly on the piano, which not infrequently is adorned with a blue or crimson worked cover.
There is not much to be done in the bulb gardens in the winter, at all events during the frosts. The land is put to bed, most of the bulb fields are covered with straw or reeds, only those containing the hardiest sorts, such as Scilla sibirica, Winter aconite, and a few others, are left bare. This covering, which is of varying thickness to suit the bulbs below, is not moved till the frost breaks and the milder weather sets in. But when this happens there is a good deal to do, for it has to be shifted in accordance with the rise and fall of the thermometer: partially removed if the weather keeps mild, else the bulbs would develop too fast in the warmth underneath; replaced for cold nights, or if sharp frost is likely. In early spring great attention has to be given to this, for with sunny mid-days, sharp night frosts, periods of prolonged soaking rain and sudden nipping winds, there is much trouble in suitably protecting and not over-covering the bulbs.
In England the flowering of the crocus is looked upon with a certain amount of joy. It is not, like the first snowdrop, the solitary blooming of some brave single flower, which gives hope that the winter may be going, but the sudden bursting into bloom of hundreds, which declare that the sun has power again. A ribbon of yellow on the grass, battalions of compact mauve figures on the slope, whole armies, violet and white and gold, delicately fragrant, alive with humming bees, definitely proclaiming the doom of winter. If this is so in England, in Holland the flowering of the crocus means more still; every flower represents a separate young crocus, a sound saleable corm, if the grower knows his business and the ground is good. The bulbs, blooming in hundreds, stand for a harvest underground, the census of which might be taken from above, had one time and patience to count the flowers, for at the base of each flower-shoot that the parent bulb throws up a little young bulb will be found when the roots are lifted at the end of June. So a field of flowering crocuses is more than a thing of delicate beauty, and more than a sign that winter is over and past, and the time of the return of the storks is at hand, it stands for so many fawn-coloured bulbs—a marketable commodity, and each in itself a mystery of re-creation and increase.
THE PROMISE OF SPRING
Crocuses are not much grown in the immediate vicinity of Haarlem, the land there is too valuable to be devoted to the inexpensive bulb. Many thousands come from Hille, some small growers there make a speciality of them, and grow little else; it is they who supply the big men who supply the markets. There would seem to be about eighty-three sorts of crocus now, which is something of an increase on the six sorts which “Robinio of Paris, that painful and curious searcher after simples,” sent to Gerard. By Parkinson’s time there appear to have been thirty-one sorts known; but they had begun to cultivate bulbs in earnest in his day, and to them it would have been more a matter of interest than surprise to see our varieties, all of which, on the authority of the grower, it is said, “have been derived from (grown from seed of) the original Crocus vernus of South and Central Europe.” When this crocus was first introduced into Holland it is not easy to say. Nor is it easy to discover “when” (in the words of the same grower) “cultivators and amateurs began to hybridise the different forms”—nor yet when there first were different forms of it to hybridise; certainly it happened very long ago. There is a tradition that the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) was introduced into England in 1339. Hakluyt speaks of its being brought by a pilgrim who, appreciating the sovereign value of the plant, and “proposing to do good to his country,” carried home a root hidden in his staff, which had been made hollow “of purpose,” though whether for the purpose of carrying saffron or anything else of value or interest he could pick up, is not clear. In either case the proceeding is rather typically English, as also are Hakluyt’s further remarks on saffron growing. He regrets that it has become a failing industry in these days, when many sturdy fellows are without work, and suggests, even as we suggest the revival of sundry curious things, that it should be revived for the benefit of the unemployed, who then, as now, were a cut-and-come-again problem.
It is interesting to notice that the older writers include all crocuses and colchicums under the name saffron, not meaning, as we do now, only the Crocus sativus. This crocus, and other varieties of autumn-flowering ones, are grown in Holland; the delicate flowers, beautifying some few fields when the rest are, for the most part, bare, give to them almost a look of spurious spring. It was no doubt this spring-like look of the autumn flowers which inspired the legend that they first appeared in fields where Medea spilt some drops of the magic liquor she had prepared to restore Æson to the vigour of youth. No doubt also it was this, and the fact that, reversing the usual order, the seed heads come in the spring, that gave them their old name, “Sonne-before-the-father.”
The original crocus of all crocuses is now believed to have been a native of Kashmere, and to have followed the Aryan migration through the temperate globe; brought, no doubt, in the first instance for its saffron, whereof it would seem these remote ancestors of the European race thought as highly as did Hakluyt’s pilgrim. In its various wild forms it is found now in Persia and the Levant, in the Alps and the Apennines, in Italy and Greece, and on the lower slopes of the Pyrenees; and it has been so long in these countries that it has come to be reckoned an indigenous flower, and has a place in many old legends. Ovid tells us that Proserpine was picking “graceful crocus and white lilies” when she was carried off. It is he also who tells of the origin of the flower in Greece. A youth named Crocus in love with a nymph Smilax: he, for the impatience of his love, turned into the flower; and she—for no apparent reason, which seems unfair—turned into, not the delicate green plant we call by her name, but a yew tree, a somewhat sombre fate for the inamorata of so ephemeral a trifler as Crocus appears.
In spite of this tale of impatient love there does not seem to be any record, as one might have expected, of the use of crocus in the flavouring of love philtres or charms. The veil of Hymen was saffron-coloured; the flower, among others, sprang up on the ground where Zeus and Hera reclined, from sheer astonishment, one might imagine, at seeing the Olympian pair on good terms. We ourselves have dedicated it to St. Valentine—
“While the crocus hastens to the shrine