A BULB FARM NEAR OVERVEEN
Anemones at that same time stood for the melancholy word “Forsaken”; this probably on account of the Greek legend of their origin,—a legend of the order not unfamiliar in Greek mythology, the loves of the gods, the jealousies of the goddesses, the metamorphosis of the object, and the desertion of the lover. In this case Zephyr, who abandoned the nymph, thus transformed by Flora, to the rude caresses of Boreas, who, unable to gain her love, shakes her afresh every spring. This legend probably belonged, in the first instance, to the earlier blooming Star Anemones and Hepaticas, those flowers at whose opening old gardeners used to say, “the earth is in love, now is the time to sow.” These, too, are grown in Holland, and have been since the day when Clusius first brought there the yellow anemone he found at the “foot of St. Bernard’s Hill near unto the Canton of the Switzers.” Since the days, too, when the old herbalists used the leaves of some sorts in “the ointment called Marciatum, which is composed of many other hot herbes, and is used in cold griefs, to warme and comfort the parts.” And even if they and the Anemone coronaria do not now fetch the high prices they did when they were among the collector’s fancies, they are still a good deal in demand.
Among the flowers grown in the bulb gardens of to-day which favour has treated somewhat strangely the Fritillaria family should certainly be mentioned. The Crown Imperial, king and chief of the Fritillarias, is grown now as it was in the early days of the bulb industry; the big lily-like bulbs are treated in much the same way, and the old varieties are there with comparatively few new ones added to them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Crown Imperials ranked high among flowers. Parkinson gives them the place of honour in his Garden of Pleasant Flowers, and, in the pretty way of the old writers speaking of a loved or admired object, lifts them from the neuter to the gendered class: “The Crowne Imperial for his stately beautifulness, deserveth the first place in this our garden of delights.” And judging from some of the legends that have gathered about the flower, one imagines it was cultivated and admired even earlier. But during the nineteenth century it went out of favour, for some reason the “refined and elegant” ceased to admire it and gardeners to cultivate it, other flowers filling the place in popular favour.
No gorgeous flowers the meek Reseda grace,
Yet sip, with eager trunk, yon busy race
Her simple cup, nor heed the dazzling gem
That beam in Fritillaria’s diadem—
wrote a drawing-room poet of the early nineteenth century; and though the beautifully banal—also botanically and every other way incorrect—lines must not be regarded as exactly expressing the minds of his compeers, yet the fact that they were written and quoted shows favour was not then for the Crown Imperial. It is coming back to the present generation; possibly, in England at least, because a certain number of the old bulbs were preserved in cottage gardens, and so acquired the reputation of simplicity and old-fashionedness, now so frequently a passport to favour.
