The bulb, even now after all these years of cultivation, is no trifle to produce, no untended child of a summer’s growth. It takes four years, and care and understanding, to raise a marketable hyacinth bulb; four years, or in some very propitious soils and circumstances, possibly three. There are two methods open to the grower who is producing hyacinths: either he slightly hollows the base of the bulb from which he wants increase, or else he cross-cuts it in several directions with cuts nearly half an inch deep. If he follows the latter course, he must bury the bulb after cutting for a week, so that the cuts may open and remain open. After that he will treat it as a hollowed bulb is treated, that is, leave it alone in the dry warmth of the barn, and in time there will appear between the layers innumerable young bulblets, of sizes varying from a grain of rice to a pea. One may sometimes see on the shelves of bulb barns the swollen and distorted parent bulbs, the young bulbs distending all their coats, waiting in the warmth for the time of planting. The parent, whether cut or hollowed, is planted whole in this state, when a proportion of the young bulbs take individual root and establish a separate existence. When in July the bulbs are taken out of the ground the young ones are found to be nice little bulbs of quite moderate proportions. Not yet, of course, of saleable size nor of the blooming age; they want more years of planting and lifting at the proper seasons before they are the substantial bulbs of commerce. They flower before that time, sometimes in the first but more often in the second year, but they have not come to perfection, and it is not till they are four years old that there may be expected the perfect, big, trussed flower.
Seeing the labour in production one wonders, not that hyacinths are “so dear,” but rather that they are so cheap; also one feels that they are hardly treated with the respect they deserve in England. “They,” so it is often complained here, “do so little good the second year, and the offset bulbs, when there are any, are so very poor.” But why not? Why should not the offsets be poor? If under the hands of those who give time, and experience, and understanding, they are only good after so much labour, why should they be good without any trouble or labour at all? And for doing well a second year, a hyacinth is as other plants, it has its time of maturity, its gradual approach to it, and its decline: it takes four years to reach its finest under this treatment; afterwards it usually declines from it. The rate and style of the decline will vary, but it is not likely to be delayed by the treatment of the English amateur or in the English flower-bed. “It is,” so an old grower once said, “as you may call the flower of one year, but what a flower! It requires four years to make it, then there is the Flower; after that—it is nothing, usually I would not say thank you for it. Ah, but when it is there, it is indeed a Flower! One can respect that!”
In England hyacinths are not respected; the average English gardener now wants something by the hundred for the border, he does not want individuality. The old ladies who used to grow hyacinths in tall blue and green glasses treated them with more respect. Hyacinth glasses are not beautiful, yet one feels tenderly towards them for old sake’s sake,—the memories of drowsy hours spent stumbling over Easy Reading for the Young, in a room where the glasses stood on the window-sill when spring had dethroned the red sausage-shaped draught excluder, and the canary that hung between chirped as he peeped first at the white flower in the blue glass and then at the pink flower in the green, and possibly (at least in the stumbling reader’s mind) speculated as to whether the ghostly roots to be seen through the glass were a rare and horrible specimen of worm. Those hyacinths were appreciated, the first opening of the flowers noted, the number of bells counted, the scent enjoyed with neighbours not similarly blessed with bulbs. Now we do not grow hyacinths in glasses. We, some people, grow them in pans, where they look very like a small flower-bed moved into the house. Six or eight “miniature hyacinths” (these are the immature offset bulbs of one or two years’ growth) crammed in together, where, one would think, they must be very uncomfortable, though it does not prevent them from each producing a truss of flowers, smaller and looser certainly than that of a mature hyacinth, but giving satisfaction to the uninitiated. Some people grow hyacinths singly in pots, and stand them in rows on conservatory shelves or about their rooms, where they look well if the rooms are solidly Victorian, or furnished with beautiful specimens of cabinet-work in satinwood and tulipwood. Your hyacinth is no modern, no ornament for the furniture and rooms of nouveaux arts or culture, and it sorts very ill with half-toned æsthetics or the expensive pseudo-simple. Possibly that may account for its being rather out of fashion in England just now, where few people have a taste for the solidly Victorian, and fewer still the money for the old satinwood of the eighteenth century, or the exquisite tulipwood of France. Long ago it was different; seventeenth-century England admired hyacinths greatly, obtaining, then as now, all the really good ones from Holland, where already they were extensively cultivated. The price fetched by choice bulbs then was high, though never quite equal to that of tulips at the zenith of their fame. Report speaks of £200 being paid for a single hyacinth bulb in the middle of the seventeenth century; but by the end of the eighteenth £25 was thought extravagant, even for a choice florist’s variety. According to a writer in 1796, the price of ordinary bulbs then varied from 3d. apiece to, in rare cases, as much as £10. A fairly wide range, and one that is not so very dissimilar from that of the present time, though it is probable we now have a greater selection at 3d. and a smaller at £10.
Hyacinths in the bulb gardens of Holland are planted in September in very heavily manured ground. In the winter they have to be protected by a thick covering of straw, more, indeed, than is given to any bulbs except some of the lily family, usually from four to five inches in thickness. This is taken off in spring, when the crowns appear; it is essential that they should not be kept covered too long or too closely in mild weather, or the prematurely developed shoots will be too tender to stand the night frosts of early spring. Hyacinths are subject to some few diseases; one of them necessitates the removal of a suspected bulb from among its neighbours. Sometimes one may see a procession of men going forth to the hyacinth fields, each armed with a long narrow tool, in shape a little like the instrument used for cutting asparagus in Belgium; and also, if the weather is sunny, each carrying an umbrella, an article much more used in Holland than in England. The procession, to which the umbrellas give something of dignity if not solemnity, moves slowly along a field, each man taking a row and examining the hyacinths one by one for signs of the disease. With his umbrella he shields the sun from his head and neck, the weather usually seems to be hot on these occasions; with his tool he neatly and cleanly lifts the suspected bulb from among its fellows.
“IN EMERALD TUFTS, FLOWERS PURPLE, BLUE, AND
WHITE, LIKE SAPPHIRE, PEARL, AND RICH EMBROIDERY.”
Hyacinth flowers are cut off before their beauty is quite spent, so that they shall not come to seed. Generally speaking, no bulb of any sort is allowed to come to seed, unless of course that particular seed is wanted for the raising of new varieties; to produce seed greatly exhausts the bulb. Hyacinth flowers are cut close down to the leaves; sometimes the cut blooms are scattered over the ground, where other sorts of bulbs, as yet not showing shoots, are growing, this to prevent the light sandy soil from being blown away, leaving the bulbs beneath bare. Some few of the flowers are sold; some, I have heard it said, are used for manure; but the great bulk of them seem just a waste product. As yet nothing has been done with regard to extracting the scent from them, though one would almost have thought it had been worth while. Of course there would be difficulties in the way, the flowers have too much moisture to allow of their being steam-distilled, like roses and some other scent-providing flowers, and to pomade them, as violets are pomaded, would be rather a costly process.
The hyacinth Hyacinthus orientalis, though certainly the great man of the family, as parent of all that are commonly called hyacinths, is, after all, only one of a group. Parkinson gives forty-eight “iacinths,” as he spells them. Some of them, it is true, would seem to be only varieties of the same kind, and some are things placed in other classes by modern florists. Still, even without these, a good many remain, and some at least are grown in the bulb gardens of Holland to-day. Grape hyacinths (Muscari, because they were supposed to smell of musk) are of these. They are a good deal grown in Holland, and are coming into much favour in England, no one knows why. Hyacinthus candicans is also grown in Holland. This, of course, is a newcomer from the Cape, unknown to Parkinson; its tall stalks and far-scattered white bells give it little resemblance in appearance to the rest of its relations. The wood hyacinth, Nutans, is also raised, but is usually to be found under the heading “Squills” in a grower’s list. Parkinson classes it with his iacinths, where one would have thought it belonged, calling it Hyacinthus anglicus belgiciis. He also classes with them what he calls Scilla alba—the common squill of the Mediterranean—the great and important squill of old medicine, which, according to the herbalists, must have been good for everything, epidemic, accidental, and chronic, from worms to toothache, though most especially for consumptive diseases. “The Apothecaries prepare thereof both Wine, Vinegar and Oxymel or Syrupe, which is singular to exterminate and expectorate tough flegm, which is a cause of much disquiet to the body, and an hinderer of concoction, or digestion in the stomach, besides divers other wayes, wherein the scales of the roots being dried, are used. And Galen hath sufficiently explained the qualities and properties thereof, in his eight book of Simples.” Pliny, doubtless, explained something of the same, for he, too, wrote of squills. So did that magnificent Dutchman, Clusius, who reports that when, in the true spirit of inquiry, he was about to make personal test of the Scilla rubra, he was stopped by the Spaniards, who assured him it was a most strong and potent poison. It is to be regretted that the Dutchmen of to-day do not grow the Scilla rubra, though perhaps it is not unreasonable, for, according to all accounts, it was not much to look at.
Among the flowers much more grown in Holland to-day than in former times iris stands well first. The iris, of course, is an old flower, even though it may have lost its first Greek name, and taken another after that rather overworked personage, the cutter of life’s threads and rain-bringer, Juno’s rainbow-winged messenger. Under various names the iris, whether tuberous or bulbous, has figured a good deal in history and legend. There has even been controversy about it, whether Shakespeare meant an iris or a lily when he spoke of fleur-de-lys in another than heraldic sense, and whether Chaucer did.
It is quite clear the old masters of medicine understood “flower-de-luce” as iris, whether they spoke of “the bulbous blue kind” or the tuberous “flaggy kind,” the white flag of Florence, from which they, as we, derived orris root, and the common yellow flag from which they derived other things which we do not. Their descriptions and receipts for mingling the extract with honey to mitigate the sharpness of its attack upon the stomach (!) have come down to us to convince us that they knew the iris; also that they, such of them as survived, were stouter men inside than their decadent descendants.