CROCUS AND EARLY SPRING FLOWERS
Winter in the bulb country is not a very attractive time, at least to
the foreigner. The same possibly may be said of winter in England,
though few healthy Englishmen, unless tied very tightly to town, admit
it. Winter in Holland is long, and, more often than not, very cold. The
canals are often frozen for a considerable time, when the easiest way
to get about in the country districts is on skates. Nearly all Dutchmen
are at home on skates; comparatively few are clever oarsmen, though one
might have thought they had equal opportunities. The reason probably
is, that one can go upon one’s work or business on skates, and save
rather than lose time thereby; whereas, in the average man’s
circumstances, one can only row for recreation. In England, of course,
such a reason would not operate; and, given the Dutch facilities, one
can imagine that as many good sportsmen would assemble to watch
inter-county contests on the frozen or liquid water (according to
season) as now enthusiastically look on at cricket or football matches.
Certainly there are very marked differences between the nations.
[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE STORKS]
They show among the women not less than the men. The pride, at least of
the more old-fashioned Dutch housewife, is her stove, the closed
stoves, which heat the room very well and very cleanly, give little
assistance to ventilation, and offer none of the cheer and sympathy of
the open fire. I have only met or heard of one English housewife who
was proud of a shining stove, and she lived in the Potteries, and was
the wife of a cheerful drunkard. In summer the majority of the stoves
in Dutch houses are taken down and put away—one would like to know
where. They must require room to store, and present an interesting
sight, wrapped in winding-sheets of greased paper, keeping their summer
Sabbath, like the dead kings waiting the summons of Charlemagne’s
sword. But the finest and most handsome of stoves are not taken down,
they remain in place through the summer, covered when the weather is
damp and when the room they adorn is not to be occupied; on no account
to be used for fire—standing as a testimony to the owner’s housewifery
and an impressive object to the visitor. One visitor, at least, was
impressed by such a shining steel tower, impressed with the amount of
elbow-grease required to keep it in order, if nothing else; though that
same visitor had the bad taste to admire far more an old stove,
exhibited with similar pride, by the host of a little inn on a remote
Swiss road—a wonderful stone stove, with the date 1700 cut into it, and
a history as interesting as would be the experiment (for the
uninitiated) of lighting a fire there. A stove, that, to burn
compromising papers, to destroy blood-stained garments and traces of
crime, while the storm thundered without, as it did that day. The Dutch
stoves, no doubt infinitely better fitted for combustion and real
destruction of such things, or any other, make no such suggestions.
They suggest, besides the pride of housewives and the pains of
maid-servants, merely the useful heating apparatus of a comfortable
home, where, when the short days draw in and the lamp is lighted, the
family sit about the table and read and work—do crochet work and study
the foreign classics. Or perhaps examine pollen and plant parasites
with a microscope; or play very sweetly on the piano, which not
infrequently is adorned with a blue or crimson worked cover.
There is not much to be done in the bulb gardens in the winter, at all
events during the frosts. The land is put to bed, most of the bulb
fields are covered with straw or reeds, only those containing the
hardiest sorts, such as _Scilla sibirica_, _Winter aconite_, and a few
others, are left bare. This covering, which is of varying thickness to
suit the bulbs below, is not moved till the frost breaks and the milder
weather sets in. But when this happens there is a good deal to do, for
it has to be shifted in accordance with the rise and fall of the
thermometer: partially removed if the weather keeps mild, else the
bulbs would develop too fast in the warmth underneath; replaced for
cold nights, or if sharp frost is likely. In early spring great
attention has to be given to this, for with sunny mid-days, sharp night
frosts, periods of prolonged soaking rain and sudden nipping winds,
there is much trouble in suitably protecting and not over-covering the
bulbs.
In England the flowering of the crocus is looked upon with a certain
amount of joy. It is not, like the first snowdrop, the solitary
blooming of some brave single flower, which gives hope that the winter
may be going, but the sudden bursting into bloom of hundreds, which
declare that the sun has power again. A ribbon of yellow on the grass,
battalions of compact mauve figures on the slope, whole armies, violet
and white and gold, delicately fragrant, alive with humming bees,
definitely proclaiming the doom of winter. If this is so in England, in
Holland the flowering of the crocus means more still; every flower
represents a separate young crocus, a sound saleable corm, if the
grower knows his business and the ground is good. The bulbs, blooming
in hundreds, stand for a harvest underground, the census of which might
be taken from above, had one time and patience to count the flowers,
for at the base of each flower-shoot that the parent bulb throws up a
little young bulb will be found when the roots are lifted at the end of
June. So a field of flowering crocuses is more than a thing of delicate
beauty, and more than a sign that winter is over and past, and the time
of the return of the storks is at hand, it stands for so many
fawn-coloured bulbs—a marketable commodity, and each in itself a
mystery of re-creation and increase.
[Illustration: THE PROMISE OF SPRING]
Crocuses are not much grown in the immediate vicinity of Haarlem, the
land there is too valuable to be devoted to the inexpensive bulb. Many
thousands come from Hille, some small growers there make a speciality
of them, and grow little else; it is they who supply the big men who
supply the markets. There would seem to be about eighty-three sorts of
crocus now, which is something of an increase on the six sorts which
“Robinio of Paris, that painful and curious searcher after simples,”
sent to Gerard. By Parkinson’s time there appear to have been
thirty-one sorts known; but they had begun to cultivate bulbs in
earnest in his day, and to them it would have been more a matter of
interest than surprise to see our varieties, all of which, on the
authority of the grower, it is said, “have been derived from (grown
from seed of) the original _Crocus vernus_ of South and Central
Europe.” When this crocus was first introduced into Holland it is not
easy to say. Nor is it easy to discover “when” (in the words of the
same grower) “cultivators and amateurs began to hybridise the different
forms”—nor yet when there first were different forms of it to
hybridise; certainly it happened very long ago. There is a tradition
that the saffron crocus (_Crocus sativus_) was introduced into England
in 1339. Hakluyt speaks of its being brought by a pilgrim who,
appreciating the sovereign value of the plant, and “proposing to do
good to his country,” carried home a root hidden in his staff, which
had been made hollow “of purpose,” though whether for the purpose of
carrying saffron or anything else of value or interest he could pick
up, is not clear. In either case the proceeding is rather typically
English, as also are Hakluyt’s further remarks on saffron growing. He
regrets that it has become a failing industry in these days, when many
sturdy fellows are without work, and suggests, even as we suggest the
revival of sundry curious things, that it should be revived for the
benefit of the unemployed, who then, as now, were a cut-and-come-again
problem.
It is interesting to notice that the older writers include all crocuses
and colchicums under the name saffron, not meaning, as we do now, only
the _Crocus sativus_. This crocus, and other varieties of
autumn-flowering ones, are grown in Holland; the delicate flowers,
beautifying some few fields when the rest are, for the most part, bare,
give to them almost a look of spurious spring. It was no doubt this
spring-like look of the autumn flowers which inspired the legend that
they first appeared in fields where Medea spilt some drops of the magic
liquor she had prepared to restore Æson to the vigour of youth. No
doubt also it was this, and the fact that, reversing the usual order,
the seed heads come in the spring, that gave them their old name,
“Sonne-before-the-father.”
The original crocus of all crocuses is now believed to have been a
native of Kashmere, and to have followed the Aryan migration through
the temperate globe; brought, no doubt, in the first instance for its
saffron, whereof it would seem these remote ancestors of the European
race thought as highly as did Hakluyt’s pilgrim. In its various wild
forms it is found now in Persia and the Levant, in the Alps and the
Apennines, in Italy and Greece, and on the lower slopes of the
Pyrenees; and it has been so long in these countries that it has come
to be reckoned an indigenous flower, and has a place in many old
legends. Ovid tells us that Proserpine was picking “graceful crocus and
white lilies” when she was carried off. It is he also who tells of the
origin of the flower in Greece. A youth named Crocus in love with a
nymph Smilax: he, for the impatience of his love, turned into the
flower; and she—for no apparent reason, which seems unfair—turned into,
not the delicate green plant we call by her name, but a yew tree, a
somewhat sombre fate for the inamorata of so ephemeral a trifler as
Crocus appears.
In spite of this tale of impatient love there does not seem to be any
record, as one might have expected, of the use of crocus in the
flavouring of love philtres or charms. The veil of Hymen was
saffron-coloured; the flower, among others, sprang up on the ground
where Zeus and Hera reclined, from sheer astonishment, one might
imagine, at seeing the Olympian pair on good terms. We ourselves have
dedicated it to St. Valentine—
“While the crocus hastens to the shrine
Of Primrose love on St. Valentine”—
though the time of its flowering probably has to do with that. But
among the many strange and unpleasant things which have been used in
the flavouring of love philtres saffron does not appear to have had a
place.
It has been used for many other things. “The crocus rayed with gold” is
among the flowers which crown Sophocles’ “mighty goddess.” The Greeks
also, we know, reckoned it among perfumes. Aristophanes, in _The
Clouds_, has a somewhat unquotable line on the subject. Among the
Easterns it was held a choice spice: “Spikenard and saffron, calamus
and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes,” were
the spices that were to flow out from the garden of the Beloved in The
Song of Solomon. One old authority held it to be the food of the
fairies, and the humans in his day held it in high esteem. But now it
is fallen from its high estate, and, though the County Council or some
other body might still prosecute a man for selling adulterated saffron,
it would be disinterested philanthropy, and bear no resemblance to the
burning of offenders at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century for a
similar offence. In Persia it is still much used as a condiment; in a
less degree in Spain; in Holland one finds it flavouring rice boiled
with milk; here in England it lingers still in the saffron cakes of
Cornwall, otherwise it plays small part, except as a food-colouring
matter. For that it seems to have been in use in Shakespeare’s time.
The clown, who has so many things to buy for Perdita’s shearing feast,
ticks it off among the rest: “I must have saffron,” he says, “to colour
the warden pies.” And we, though we have lost the receipt for warden
pies, still use saffron to colour our cookery. Especially is this the
case in Russia, where the law holds that all food-colouring must be
vegetable,—a singular law, when one comes to think that all the
alkaloid poisons are of vegetable origin, and for real nastiness it is
hard to beat some of the dyes of Nature’s providing.
But it was as a drug that the saffron crocus was most greatly prized
among the peoples of middle and western Europe. In the late middle ages
it appears to have been much used as an eye-wash,—one feels it was
fortunate folk did not have to try their eyes then as now. By Gerard’s
time it was in great favour for many things; he speaks of it as making
“the senses more quicke and lively, shaking off heavie and drowsie
sleep, and making a man merrie.” “It is a herb of the Sun and under the
Lion,” writes N. Culpeper, student of physic and astrology in 1652.
“Let not above 10 grains be given at one time, for if the Sun, which is
the fountain of life, may dazzle the eyes and make them blinde, a
Cordial being taken in an inordinate quantity may hurt the heart
instead of helping it.” This view possibly led to crocus standing in an
early Victorian _Language of Flowers_ for “excess,” or—in the generous
way that one small flower might then be interpreted to mean a whole
phrase—“beware of excess of love.” But it is more than as a cordial for
the heart that N. Culpeper regards saffron: “It quickens the brain,” he
says, “for the Sun is exalted in Aries, as well as he hath his house in
the Dragon head, it helps the Consumption of the Lungs and difficulty
of breathing, it is an excellent thing in epidemical diseases, as
Pestillence, Small Pox, and Measles; it is an excellent expulsive
medicine and a notable remedy for the Yellow Jaundice.” More than this
can hardly be asked of one plant. After it the humble snowdrop is a
mere nobody.
The snowdrop may, with justice, be called humble, certainly it has a
much better right to the title than the violet. Gerard, by the way,
speaks of it as a “bulbous violet,” though there seems little
resemblance between them, except the ascribed qualities of humility and
retirement, which are entirely undeserved in one case. Violets like
sunshine, a good position, and fat living, and, though the leaves hide
the flowers in some varieties, it is of those that the scent is
strongest and most betraying. It is not the fault of the plant if it is
suffered to “blush unseen.” But snowdrops really do like retirement and
poor ground. In Holland they decline entirely to grow in the open in
fields or gardens, and they cannot thrive, really cannot live, in
manure and all fat soil. All the snowdrop bulbs which are raised in
Holland are grown under hedges or in orchards, where the roots of the
trees impoverish the ground and take from it what the little bulbs
dislike. Mostly they are grown by the smaller growers, who sell them to
the big ones in their immediate neighbourhood. It is possibly this
preference for overgrown places and neglected soil which has made
snowdrops flourish and increase so in the orchards and overgrown
gardens of old monasteries. It has been suggested that it is because
they were planted there in such abundance in the old days when they
were sacred to the Virgin, and were used to strew her altars on the
Feast of the Purification,—when they, the Fair Maids of February, as
they were called, were the only maids who had any right within those
walls. But since they flourish equally well in old shrubberies and
orchards unconnected with monasteries and monastic history, it looks
rather as if soil and situation has a good deal to do with it too.
[Illustration: A CROCUS FIELD]
They have long been grown in Holland. The old Dutch name was Somer
Sottekens, though what it means I have not been able to discover.
Somer, no doubt, is another form of “Zomer” (summer), though snowdrops
no more then than now bloomed nor yet were planted in summer; Sottekens
remains, to me at least, a mystery. The first snowdrops came from
Germany and Hungary, and the later blooming sort from Constantinople.
In Parkinson’s day there was no talk of them being native to England.
They had not been in the country long enough to have increased and
naturalised themselves, as they have in some districts now.
Undisturbed, in both England and Holland they increase rapidly, by
offsets, according to the usual bulb habit; if they like the situation,
often forming clumps twenty or thirty strong, and continuing to grow in
land that has long gone out of cultivation.
In England the flower is not so much admired as it used to be, when it—
Chaste snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years—
received the tribute of much minor verse. Now we principally remember
in connection with it that it does not lend itself well to pot culture,
and makes no show as a cut flower; hence, seeing its inconspicuousness
and the usual state of the weather at the time of blooming, it is of
little use as an ornament. And the fact that it either takes so kindly
to its surroundings that it becomes almost a weed, or else dislikes
them and practically declines to grow at all, is rather against it. But
in the days of our grandmothers it was different, then it was
essentially the young girl’s flower, and so was graced with all the
characteristics which were reckoned to adorn “refined and elegant young
females.” Of it, “the Winter’s timid child,” a poetess of those days
wrote:—
All weak and wan, with head inclined,
Its parent breast the drifted snow,
It trembles, while the ruthless wind
Bends its slim form; the tempest lowers,
Its emerald eye drops crystal showers
On its cold bed below.
Where’er I find thee, gentle flower,
Thou still art sweet and dear to me!
For I have known the cheerless hour,
Have seen the sunbeams cold and pale,
Have felt the chilling wintry gale,
And wept and shrunk, like thee.
Conceive the delight of the first “elegant young female” who saw these
words inscribed on the pink-tinted pages of her album, probably beneath
some two or three dried flowers of the mishandled plant. Well, well, we
have changed all that now; the elegant females have gone, though the
minor poet is still with us, and no less minor, though possibly less
“refined.”
Earlier than crocus, as early as snowdrops, comes the winter
aconite—_Eranthis hyemalis_. It is grown in quantity in Holland, but as
the corms are so very small, not more than half an inch in diameter,
one does not see large stretches. It is said that as many as a thousand
good corms can be raised on two square metres of land, so naturally it
is sold cheap. We prize it as one of the earliest flowers of the year,
and because it is hardy, and will, if left to itself, grow anywhere,
even under deciduous shrubs. But to our forbears it had another and
greater importance, for it was reckoned the “counter-poison monkhood,”
and its roots were considered “effectual, not only against the poison
of the poisonful helmet flower and all others of that kind, but also
against the poison of all venomous beasts,”—a large and useful
characteristic to be possessed by any plant.
One of the most beautiful of the early spring flowers is one
practically without history—the _Scilla sibirica_. It is comparatively
a newcomer in Dutch bulb fields, for it was brought to Europe from Asia
Minor, the Happy Land of bulb collectors, somewhere about 1800. As yet
there are only three varieties differing from the original and first
discovered kind. These are pale blue, white, and pinkish pale blue, all
reared from seed, and none, in the opinion of the uninitiated, to
compare with the original blue,—a colour bluer than anything else that
grows, except perhaps gentians, and though not so deep and intense,
almost more brilliant and striking than they. Coming into flower almost
before crocus, growing low and close to the ground, and of this rare
and exquisite colour, a field of them in flower against the pearly
paleness of the cold landscape is a sight not to be forgotten. In
England, though they are admired, they are hardly yet grown so much as
one would expect, seeing that they will endure hard treatment and a
poor soil, and, if untouched, year after year send their blue flowers
through the grass. Immense numbers are grown in Holland, though not
round Haarlem, more in the direction of Hillegom, where the land is
cheap. The little bulbs increase rapidly, from offsets which grow
around the parent. They can also be easily raised from seed, and,
contrary to the habit of most bulbs, come to the flowering stage fairly
quickly, seed-grown Scillas being of a saleable size in from three to
four years after sowing.
It was certainly not this early blooming member of the Scilla family
that Reginald Scott had in his mind when, in his _Discovery of
Witchcraft_ (1587), he wrote of the countries “where they hang Scilla
(which is either a root or in this place garlic) in the roof of the
house to keep away witches and spirits.” One wonders a little what he
meant, for garlic is not a Scilla, and it hardly seems likely he was
referring to what Parkinson calls _Scilla alba_, or the Great Sea Onion
of the Mediterranean. Onions proper, and many varieties of the Alliums,
have, of course, played some considerable part in the history of
witchcraft. The only two cases of witchcraft which came under the
personal notice of the present writer were connected with the homely
English onion. In the one case, it was an old man who accused his
neighbour of “overlooking the onion bed,” with dire results; and in the
other, it was an accredited wizard who “named an onion for” his enemy,
stuck it full of pins, and hung it to shrivel in the chimney, in order
that the enemy might shrivel as the onion did, and within the year die
in agony. As it happened, however, it was the wizard who died. On his
death-bed he sent for the other, confessed what he had done, and
ordered that the shrivelled onion should be given him, possibly with
the idea of undoing the spell, which had rebounded on himself. The
enemy is alive to this day, and is as great a man as the other was
little, and better known for good works than the other was for
bad—wherefrom, obviously, there is a moral.
The Allium family has a long history and many uses, but as
ornamental plants they are hardly to be recommended. Some of them
are grown in Holland for that purpose, and we read of them in the
catalogues—handsome pale blue, yellow, and white flowers, and a few
rarer ones pink, very showy, and for the most part somewhat
unsavoury if broken or even slightly bruised. They are the smart
members of a homely family, and, as is usually the case with such,
though no doubt very admirable in some ways, not appealing
specially to the majority of people. But Alliums blooming, as they
do, in May, are hardly early spring flowers, and having by some
devious way reached them, the subject had better be quitted.
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