The central (fans) or young tunics, when they turn into leaves, do the work of an air-pump; they are the lungs by which the plant lives; they dilate in heat and contract in cold. When dilated they take in the air, with all with which it is impregnated, and they give it out again with the regularity that an animal breathes through its lungs.
Plants do not like the shade of trees; they need open air and sunshine, and they like places where they catch the dew and rain and mist; the moisture thus obtained through their leaves is better for them than water poured upon them from a watering-pot.
Planted in hot-houses or under glass they do without much water, because the hot air produces vapour by the sun’s rays from above or from the fire beneath, and it is necessary to introduce a little air in order to let it evaporate (but the plants must not be chilled by cold seizing them in the process). Hyacinths which are protected by planks sometimes do better than those under glass.
The planks are lifted and the plants find themselves exposed to the open air, this is only done when the air is not likely to injure them. To be kept constantly under glass or in a room sometimes affects their colour and shape. It also spoils their colour to be exposed to heavy rain or a very hot sun, which exhausts them. The leaves (as the leaves of a tree) turn on their pedicels one side to the earth, for one surface of the leaf sucks in moisture and the other gives it out. What they receive through the upper surface by day they give out through their under surface at night by a process of evaporation.
When the bulbs are planted the leaves (or fans) are already pushing forth a green shoot. The gardener does not feel particularly uneasy if the frost touches the tip of the shoot, but they are very much afraid of (the frost) its reaching the flower-buds within the shoot, for if their tops are nipped by the frost, the hyacinths will be disfigured. If any one or two of the leaf sheaths get yellow or diseased they can be cut away without injuring the bud, and neither will the bulb itself suffer, as in any case the leaves drop off in the end of the year.
It is evident now that Nature works in the bulb from the interior to the exterior, and this principle must be well borne in mind by the cultivator.
Chapter III.—Young Bulbs
Having thoroughly examined roots, leaves, and tunics, we now come to the organs of reproduction, and as the young bulbs form them themselves very oddly and irregularly at the base of the old bulb, it is very difficult even for a connoisseur to judge whether any little bulbs are coming, and still less can he foretell how many he may hope for. Sometimes they are numerous, and on single hyacinths twenty-four have been known to develop on one bulb, but on single hyacinths they develop very irregularly, while on the double they are more regular in their growth; growing from the centre; though, as the central stem with all its leaves grows, the new little bulbs are pushed more and more to the sides—sometimes they push through to the outside of the bulb, sometimes between the tunics, wherever they can get air.
Each baby bulb contains the same number of (fans) leaves as the parent shoot, and develops in the same way—only that the first flower of the new bulb is very thin and small. The tunics partake of the same bulbous substance which forms the base of the bulb until it grows to the height (or point) when it begins to take the suberous quality which distinguishes the leaves from the bulb substance, and so the tunics, as far upwards as they partake of the bulb substance, possess the same capacity of producing young bulbs, which grow from them in the same manner as from the base.
Some gardeners, in order to multiply their bulbs more rapidly, perform the following operation: with the point of a penknife they cut into the base of the bulb (the point turned upwards and inwards), turning the knife round inside the bulb, the base is cut out (with crown and centre) in the shape of a cone—the upper portion forming a concave, exactly fitting the convex of the base (which is the interior which has been separated by the knife).