Dutch Bulbs and Gardens

by Una L. Silberrad; Sophie Lyall

In the ground which surrounds the grower’s house are to be found the choice varieties. This ground is not often divided into big fields devoted to some one or two kinds of bulbs only. It is more usually given up to smaller patches of special flowers, or new flowers, things which need care, or watching, or else are experiments. It is here there is likely to have been first seen green ixias (Ixia viridiflora) in bloom, and the strange sound of their dry rustling heard,—the sound which, taken in conjunction with their colour, the blue-green of mildew, is somehow suggestive of Jeremiah’s valley of dry bones. Here, too, will be Californian tulips (Calochortus), and the rare great iris of Persia (Iris Susiana), and other things in their season; always much more than can be seen before Mevrouw, standing at the house door, claps her hands to tell that dinner is ready.

PALACE GARDENS, HET LOO

To go to the more distant gardens, it is well to choose the morning, if it is spring, the time of the bulbs which have made Holland famous. A windy time, this, in Holland, one well understands then the advantage of pollarding the trees. Also one understands the necessity of the high hedges or screens which separate the garden into squarish patches. They are sometimes of beech, more often hornbeam, they quite enclose the piece of land, only at each corner there is a square-cut gateless gap, which makes a large area, seen from a distance, suggestive of a gigantic maze. In hyacinth time they are, of course, quite bare of leaves, unless one counts a few yellow ones of last year clinging here and there, a beautiful sombre background to the astonishing vivid delicacy of the flowers. It is a wonderful sight, more especially when one stands among them—rows of wax pink hyacinths, each perfect and each set in its circle of bright green leaves; behind, the purple brown of the bare hedge; beyond, a glimpse of blue flowers, or pale yellow, or still more dazzling white. A sight wonderful when one stands among them, but also to be appreciated afterwards from a distance—preferably from the windows of the gardener’s little house. If the wind is very cold and den Heer is going to be very long in conference with the gardener, it is possible that, after a certain time, one can admire them more from within over such coffee as the gardener’s wife makes. A cup of such coffee, a footstool filled with hot charcoal, and a chair in the most shining kitchen possible to conceive of, are not to be despised, while den Heer, outside, talks about the cutting down of the hyacinth flowers.

To us who grow hyacinths in pots or in beds, where the failure of one is like a missing front tooth, the cutting down of the flowers seems almost a ruthless thing. We admit that it must be necessary, or it would not be done, but we feel that the men who do it ought to have some compunction about it. Though why they should be expected to feel it more than the mowers who cut the equally beautiful flowers in the English hay-fields does not appear. The bulbs in Holland are grown for their roots as much as are carrots and potatoes, as much as the grass is grown for hay. It is the poet, not the mower, who sighs over the flowers of the grass that perish; and the poet, if he happens to own hay-fields, does not hesitate to give orders for the cutting at the proper time. And the mower, if he has an eye for beauty, admires the flowers, even though he says nothing about it, and cuts them down to order. A boat-load of cut hyacinth flowers, with their beauty, and their scent, and their cutting off at highest perfection may touch the imagination more than a four-ounce bottle of heavy red-brown oil, which represents the life and fragrance of half a square mile of jasmine flowers. But it should not, if the jasmine was only grown that the oil might be made, the hyacinths equally are only grown that their roots may be fine and saleable; and when their well-being demands the cutting of the flowers there is no sacrifice in their going, for to this end they grew and matured and came to flower.

There is yet one other way of going to see a bulb garden, for those who are fortunate enough to know a grower who owns one at a so situated spot. Den Heer owned one, and on a June afternoon we went to it, his son, den Heer Karel, and I. We started from a small quay in Haarlem, travelling by boat—a boat not so much bigger than a barge, which carried a miscellaneous cargo, and a captain and crew—two souls inclusive. Captain was clean, crew rather dirty, for a Dutchman, but both very polite. They raised their hats on the slightest provocation,—it would really have saved trouble if they had kept them off altogether while I was about, and shook hands most formally with all quayside friends before casting off. There was one other passenger, an old peasant woman, with a beautiful head-dress with spiral gold wires standing out over her ears. She hugged a small goat all the voyage, as if she were afraid of its jumping overboard, or eating the green stuff which was part of her luggage, though, since she sat on that and she was a voluminous person, it is difficult to see how it could have managed to do so. There was not much to sit on besides one’s luggage if one had any, or that part of the cargo which was smooth enough and firm enough to provide a seat. It is possible den Heer Karel did not quite like the expedition. He had a feeling that it “was singular,” and if there is one thing a Dutchman does not like, it is to look singular. Maybe it is this clinging to the conventionalities, which we have rather lost, which gives one the feeling of having gone back some decades when one is among them.

But den Heer Karel was goodness itself, and, without a word of protest, made the expedition. We steamed down the canal—a narrow canal lying in the old part of the town, where old purple-red houses, with green shutters, and tales haunting their every doorway and steep gable-end, came down to the water’s edge; where broad brown craft lay crowded along the water side, and red-capped men lowered barrels from upper stories, and wooden-shod women, with their skirts girt high, clattered down the step, which alone stood between their back doors and the waterway, to fill empty pails, or empty full ones. A life and a folk strangely suggestive, at least to the foreigner, of those of Haarlem city in the days of the Spanish occupation.

The boat did not go fast that June day; indeed, once afloat in her, it was possible to realise at what a really superior speed Amsterdam had been approached on the great canal. It was also now possible to think of that canal as “great.” It was very great in comparison to this one. But even at this rate of progress Haarlem was left behind before very long, and on either side was green country. A very straight white road ran by the canal on one side. It was by this on his bicycle den Heer Karel would have gone to the bulb garden had he been alone. A remark on the subject drew from him the assurance that it was much cooler to go this way, and that the glaring white dust of the road often hurt his eyes. The which, with its dwelling on the one point of the journey agreeable to him, seems more really graceful than an assurance of delight in it; this even if he had not added, “besides, then I should not have had company, and now I have, which is pleasant.” There is a certain sincere politeness among the Dutch, which is attractive in its simplicity, and at its best recalls the Quakers.

I have been told that the village to which I went that day is surprisingly wicked. The same has been told of every village, except one, with which I have come in contact in England. Possibly, usually, with some truth, though the surprise may have lain more in the nature of the surprisee—it is hard not to think of picturesque cottages and green fields as Gardens of Eden—than in the outrageous iniquity of the villagers. Certainly den Heer Karel was no connoisseur of wickedness in any of its branches; he would be likely to find surprising most varieties that came to his notice among the village people whom he individually knew. His uncle, who was the pastor of the village, was of something the same sort, though, so the nephew said, he did not know half the bad things which were done there. The which was easy to believe when one met the pastor, a white-haired old man, whose hopeful eyes saw always the best in human nature, and whose unconscious saintship inevitably drew out the best, so that the most unrighteous, from shame or from sympathy, made efforts to be righteous in his company.

In the gardens, which were reached at the end of this leisurely voyage, ranunculi were in bloom—a flower not often to be met in quantity in England, where it is not popular. Why, is not clear, certainly one might have thought it old-fashioned enough to have returned to favour with straight-backed chairs and china dogs and cottage ornaments. The more admired anemones were nearly over that day, only a few crimson and purple flowers remained, so wide open that their black centres were all revealed. They still stood stiff and straight on their stalks, not bending to every breeze, like the ranunculi, which were a mass of dancing rosettes, scarlet for the most part, though at the far corner of the field there was a narrow strip of ivory-white ones, a beautiful colour contrast.