Mice can give much trouble to bulb growers; they are very partial to some kinds of bulbs; they eat them in the ground unless they are driven out by deep digging and laying the earth open to the frost beforehand. In the barns they naturally assume that the grower has kindly put up a good store for them. But by traps and cats and poison and wonderful Dutch orderliness they are kept under. In a bulb barn at night one hears few of the mysterious rustlings and patterings that make an English barn suggestive of hid but active life.
HYACINTH FLOWERS GOING TO MARKET
There is one other thing to be guarded against in some few barns, that is frost. Not in the generality, of course, the ones where are accumulated the ordinary bulbs of the trade; but in the ones where there are stored things for spring planting, such as gladioli, begonias, hemerocallis, dahlias, and other and choicer bulbs and tubers, the frost is a very important consideration. Some barns are very carefully protected against frost; some I know are carefully and systematically warmed during the winter months, and never, winter and summer, is the range of buildings empty. Standing in one of these, a curious thought comes; one realises, as one looks at the crowded shelves and remembers those of other barns beyond, that, could some cataclysm destroy the ornamental flora of the world, but leave untouched this range of barns with their contents (as Noah’s ark in the Deluge), there would still be a good start for repeopling the world with flowers. Representatives from all quarters of the globe are to be found in those barns, bulbs proper, and corms, and tubers, and all the variously named houses of stored plant life. Besides the hyacinth and tulip of historic fame, and the humbler crocus and snowdrop, there are calochortus of California, tigridias of Mexico, begonias of Jamaica, tuberoses of Persia, gloxinias and achimenes, cannas and crinums, amaryllis and arums—flowers native to all parts of the world, brought in the first instance by indefatigable collectors, who often have faced real enough perils in their work—the cold in Siberia, the heat in Africa, hunger and thirst, the ever probable risk of robbery and violence of the Kurds in Central Asia, the happy hunting-ground par excellence of collectors. No romance in the bulb industry now? Why, it is full of romance! And not the smallest of it, at least in the eyes of some, is the patient work, the ceaseless, never-beaten perseverance and experiment by which the adventurously brought plants are acclimatised to the chilly western countries, and cultivated and varied to the manifold forms in which we find them now grown in garden and green-house, and catalogued under various names.
The names are something of a trouble to growers, at least some that I know. “Why,” asked one who, be it remembered, regarded his work with seriousness and veneration, “Why will your English people call the flowers by such foolish names? For an instance, ‘Torch Lilies!’ Where is the torch? Where the lily? It is no lily, see the root, see the flower. And for torch, or for ‘flame flower,’ as you sometimes also call it, there is no resemblance; there is even none of the waywardness, the unsteadiness or quivering of flames; these things, I grant you, are in some flowers, as the pampas grass, but not in this, it is a stiff, a formal flower. Yes, more like to a red-hot poker, as also you call it. If you must have some other name than Kniphofia (though I do not myself perceive that it is necessary or the one easier than the other), if you must, I say, well then, it is perhaps best you have ‘red-hot poker,’ it is at worst but childish and shows no mistake in classification. But you would far sooner have it a lily, I know; all things must be called ‘lily’ now, I cannot tell why—Gladiolus, ‘the Sword Lily,’ Vallota, ‘the Scarborough Lily,’—the Scarborough Lily! One can almost as well have called it the Margate Potato!
“It is the one thing I have against the English amateurs—not all, of course, but many—they will not call a plant by its name, they will have what they call a ‘simple’ or perhaps ‘old-fashioned’ name. But it is ridiculous. If a flower has long had a simple name, as the primrose, the foxglove, well and good; if it has had it in the common language so long or longer than it has another of the botanists, why then one has no quarrel with a man for using it. But if it is a flower of late days, and there has come to it first the name of the botanist—the man who makes it some other ‘simple’ name, which is also quite erroneous, and seems to class it as lily or as some other when it is almost as soon a cabbage—is nothing less than a child. Nevertheless for these we must disfigure our catalogue with such names as Torch Lilies and the like.”
And certainly he and other growers do so “disfigure” their catalogues, for a grower is a man of business. A rather curious mixture of the commercial and the connoisseur; a practical man of business and a gardener, but, above all things, one who loves his work. With the Dutch grower, at least those of the older school, and I think the modern too, work stands first. There is no hastening through with it, so as to devote time and energies to sports and hobbies; sport does not play a large part in the Dutch grower’s life, and other hobbies are made tributary to the one great interest. There was one old man who was at heart an artist, in his far-off youth it is possible he cherished dreams; but when necessity and circumstance made him a grower he put the dreams away, though he kept his paint-box. On a Saturday sometimes, locked safely in his office, he still took out the little box of somewhat dried paints; he could no longer draw, his hands, steady enough for any delicate operations of his work, had long lost their skill. But still he sometimes carefully coloured the illustrations in his catalogues, the real flower standing in a glass before him, and the names of the paints he employed set down, so that he might more fitly describe the true colours of the flower in the next catalogue compiled. They were not always beautiful results he produced, but there was something quaintly beautiful and withal pathetic about them and him.
A BULB-GROWER’S GARDEN
Other growers there are whose tastes are scientific, or perhaps for photography or the microscope. These, too, are turned to account; exquisite photographs of flowers illustrate the bulb lists; patient examination of pollen and plant parasites, careful and systematic experiments with soils and fertilisers, give help and enlightenment in the growing and varying of the bulbs. Others there may be who have had some thought of another profession before family circumstances gave them to this life, but they are not the worse growers on that account. They would not enlarge leisure to practise arms if their tastes were military, or to read theology if their leaning was towards the ministry; but they would be content to do their duty truly and honestly, serve God and love their neighbour, and give to the work they had undertaken the whole of themselves.