CHAPTER III
HYACINTH OR IRIS?
Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, accidentally met death at the hands of that god, through the interposition of jealous Zephyr. Apollo, after grieving for his favourite, cried to his blood: “Thou shalt be a new flower inscribed with my lamentations!” and immediately after, “Behold the blood shed on the grass ceases to be blood, and a flower springs forth more beautiful than Tyrian dye, and takes the same form as the lily, save that the lily is silvery white and this is purple. Phoebus himself writes his own lamentations upon the petals, and Ai! Ai! is written upon the flower.”
But it was very long ago when Ovid told this tale of the childhood of the world, and in the course of the centuries some names get lost and some misapplied; the question is, what flower is it that sprang from the dead boy’s blood? A flower that is purple—and the Greek purple, which included many shades of red—was a colour in no way related to the French greys and violet blue that are all our hyacinths can show, but which is the colour of the common purple iris. A flower that was like a lily, which our hyacinth is not, excepting only the lily of the valley—a solitary and most untypical lily in its way of blooming; but which an iris may be taken to be, seeing its long confusion and identification with the lilies of France. And a flower that memorialised the sun-god’s grief, and was inscribed with signs of it: an inscription on the hyacinth is hard to seek, for though it is true some learned person has given the common wood hyacinth the surname Non-scriptus, what one, especially if one were a grower, would really like to see, is a hyacinth that is scriptus. The iris, on the other hand, has well-defined marks upon it, such as fancy can easily make sign-writing of sorts; which, indeed, fancy has so made in other tales—the tale of their springing from Ajax’s blood and bearing his name upon them, and the tale of their growing from the grave of the illiterate saint, and being marked with Ave Maria, the sole words of prayer he knew. From all of which it seems one must conclude that the flower called forth by Phoebus Apollo when Hyacinthus died was not what we call hyacinth now.
HYACINTHS SCATTERED ON THE SAND
Not that hyacinths are not of respectable antiquity, quite as respectable as iris. Very long ago they must have made the wreaths at festivals and of bridesmaids in Greece, as they sometimes do to this day; very long ago the Persian poet sang his fancy—
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head.
Though in the latter case, when one thinks of the great hyacinths of the bulb growers, one feels them to be a rather unwieldy decoration for the “lovely head,” and likely rather easily to be dislodged and fall to the “garden’s lap.” But the original Hyacinthus orientalis, parent of all our hyacinths, whether it came to us from Persia or from the other side of the Himalayas, as Parkinson’s sub-name zumbul indi rather suggests, was a very different thing from the hyacinth of to-day. It was a very small, poor thing, not so good as a poor specimen of the white Roman hyacinth that blooms for us at Christmas. Even in Parkinson’s time, when they had been cultivated in Europe for more than fifty years, they were very far from the present hyacinth, indeed nearer to the parent’s standard. “They have,” he says, “flowers of a fair bluish purple colour, and all standing many times on one side the stalk and many times on both.” A hyacinth now that is not flowered equally all round is an unheard-of failure. And in number of florets, too, things are considerably altered; a writer at the end of the eighteenth century speaks of a fine hyacinth truss having from twenty to thirty bells; now the average is from fifty to sixty, and one specimen of the variety Jacques, bloomed in Haarlem, had one hundred and ten. All this, of course, is the consequence of careful selection and cultivation, selection and cultivation, and selection again, an art in which the Dutch growers excel, and which is more successfully manifested in the development of the hyacinth than in anything else.
Of all bulbs, hyacinths perhaps are the most typically Dutch; tulips may have the greater name, but other western nations have an interest in them and a tradition of them. We find them in our old memoirs and tales; we see them on the embroidered waistcoats of the beaux of Queen Anne’s court, and among the enamelled toys of the late days of the French monarchy; they are figured in the prim paintings of our great-grandmothers and on the cups of Dresden and Lowestoft china; they even occur on the porcelain fragments that are discovered on the far-off African coast, though probably there they are of Dutch or Chino-Dutch origin. But a hyacinth, a big, full hyacinth, is essentially and entirely Dutch; its very type and standard of beauty is almost national, and nowhere else in the world can the bulb be produced in perfection. In Ghent and near Berlin, in the sandy Spree plain, it has been tried, but never with real success; the production of the true, fine, and perfect hyacinth bulb belongs to the Dutch growers alone.