The gardens are sometimes rather far from the house, and often not very near each other, one man owning or renting several at considerable distances apart. Some of the younger men use bicycles to get from one to the other, some of the elder tricycles, which seems a doubtful expedient, seeing the nature of the roads. One old man who used the latter method, and wished to try the former, wept tears of sheer rage when his wife and family interfered, for the sake of his safety, to prevent him from learning to ride the swifter machine. And, being Dutch not French, he was not content with weeping, but proceeded to frustrate their well-meant interference. Of an evening, when by his own account he was late working in the office, he took his son’s bicycle to a bulb barn, and, by the light of a lantern, rode it up and down the centre aisle. He damaged himself a good deal from time to time, and the bicycle somewhat; but he was not discovered. He explained his own injuries in various ingenious, if not strictly truthful, ways; and of the bicycle’s he was never suspected, although he showed himself generous in subscribing to the cost of repairing the mysteriously caused damage. He spent most of the evenings of one winter in this way. It took him all that time to at all master the machine. He was less apt than determined, and, had he not been bent on proving his independence, he might have given up. But he was bent, very seriously—one knows the concentration with which he ground up and down the barn aisle night after night, peering with short-sighted eyes for unseen obstacles among the lantern shadows, and colliding with the same corner at the same time each turn. In the spring he bought a second-hand bicycle. He was too good a man of business to risk the price of a new one on his own proficiency as a rider on the roads; moreover, he wanted a machine with solid tyres, he preferred the substantiality. On his purchase he rode proudly to his own door, and dismounted in time to save himself from falling off at his wife’s feet. He is now occasionally to be seen on the roads, a proud and perspiring man. It is true, he does not ride his bicycle very much when his wife is not about to protest and object, but he is always (verbally at least) an enthusiast about it. It is his opinion that the roads of Holland are the most excellent in the world for cycles. They are, he says, no matter what the weather, always so clean. That is true, clean they are; but good!—it is a matter of opinion. There is a foot-wide brick track in the centre, deep sand everywhere else; at least such are the roads to the bulb gardens I know best.
But in den Heer’s case part of the bulb land was round the house. He had other farther away. Land so near Haarlem is too valuable for a man to own all he wants there. It would, of course, be to this near garden he would go when the important letters were finished and the visitor rested. It is no impressionist picture of colour splashes to be got there, but detailed, like an old Dutch painting. You do not see the stretches of blue and yellow iris, you see the flowers. They are individuals to den Heer, not masses. He knows them, or, at least, representatives among them. He stops before the long strip of new iris—mixed sorts raised from seed, in the hope of producing some variety worth saving and propagating.
“Ah, Ah!” he will purr as he touches some one among them, “here we have a good flower, the violet—the true violet—observe the eye.”
You observe the flower, and the three plush spots on the lower petals, and do not perceive it to be very different, or, to tell the truth, very superior to anything you have seen before. But he perceives it and has already marked the plant.
“This we will multiply,” he says, “in time you will see this in the catalogues. You shall give it a name.”
You give one, the name of the boat that brought you to Holland perhaps, or perhaps “Amethyst,” in honour of the purple tone which den Heer perceives, although you do not. And then you turn to admire another flower, a perfect blue, which seems very beautiful. But the chances are your admiration is misplaced.
“It is nothing,” den Heer says with a shrug, at the same time cutting the bloom for you with the smallest and sharpest of knives. “There are many as fine, many better, the Darling, the Solfatare, both more blue. Did this, now, show any rosy markings, that would be something indeed in Iris hispanica.”
It no doubt would, though possibly not an improvement in the eyes of the uninitiated. If you are of this opinion, you do not say so, but follow den Heer among the flowers, noticing how one here and there is marked out for the honour of multiplication. A somewhat remote honour, which will not bring them into catalogue fame yet; may not bring them at all. For this reason the naming of the purple iris is hardly important, little more than a graceful compliment to the namer. The chances are rather in favour of the flower not being found worthy of founding a family to use the name; and even if it were, like the thousands of babies daily named, there is small likelihood of its achieving great fame.
Beyond the irises, divided by a high hornbeam screen, there are white gladioli; from the distance little but an irregular white blur in a small field they do not fill; but near spotless flowers, bending like a bevy of shy girls at their first communion, or novices waiting their bridal with the Church. Den Heer will stop to tell you which is the “true Bride,” the perfect snow-white flower with no suspicion of purple on the stamen tips or faintly tinging the depth of the throat. He will tell you how the beautiful Bride, no matter how carefully grown and selected, has a tendency in these faint colour stains to show its remote ancestor, the ugly little magenta flower of the Canary Islands. He will also pick out for you the full flower head, twenty florets on a stalk, five open at once, a perfection by no means always obtained.
By the white gladioli is a great patch of the taller and later blooming sort, not yet fully out, but already showing hints of their gorgeous colours, salmon and scarlet, pale yellow and delicate mauve. All the many tints to be found among them since the discovery of varieties at the Cape (where, by the way, the corms are eaten by the Hottentots) has allowed of endless crossings and hybridisings, and has removed them in beauty far from the few indigenous European sorts. Those of which Parkinson wrote with the satisfaction of one catching a famous rival tripping: “Gerard mistaketh the French kind for the Italian.”