HYACINTH OR IRIS?
Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, accidentally met death at the hands of
that god, through the interposition of jealous Zephyr. Apollo, after
grieving for his favourite, cried to his blood: “Thou shalt be a new
flower inscribed with my lamentations!” and immediately after, “Behold
the blood shed on the grass ceases to be blood, and a flower springs
forth more beautiful than Tyrian dye, and takes the same form as the
lily, save that the lily is silvery white and this is purple. Phoebus
himself writes his own lamentations upon the petals, and Ai! Ai! is
written upon the flower.”
But it was very long ago when Ovid told this tale of the childhood of
the world, and in the course of the centuries some names get lost and
some misapplied; the question is, what flower is it that sprang from
the dead boy’s blood? A flower that is purple—and the Greek purple,
which included many shades of red—was a colour in no way related to the
French greys and violet blue that are all our hyacinths can show, but
which is the colour of the common purple iris. A flower that was like a
lily, which our hyacinth is not, excepting only the lily of the
valley—a solitary and most untypical lily in its way of blooming; but
which an iris may be taken to be, seeing its long confusion and
identification with the lilies of France. And a flower that
memorialised the sun-god’s grief, and was inscribed with signs of it:
an inscription on the hyacinth is hard to seek, for though it is true
some learned person has given the common wood hyacinth the surname
_Non-scriptus_, what one, especially if one were a grower, would really
like to see, is a hyacinth that is _scriptus_. The iris, on the other
hand, has well-defined marks upon it, such as fancy can easily make
sign-writing of sorts; which, indeed, fancy has so made in other
tales—the tale of their springing from Ajax’s blood and bearing his
name upon them, and the tale of their growing from the grave of the
illiterate saint, and being marked with Ave Maria, the sole words of
prayer he knew. From all of which it seems one must conclude that the
flower called forth by Phoebus Apollo when Hyacinthus died was not what
we call hyacinth now.
[Illustration: HYACINTHS SCATTERED ON THE SAND]
Not that hyacinths are not of respectable antiquity, quite as
respectable as iris. Very long ago they must have made the wreaths at
festivals and of bridesmaids in Greece, as they sometimes do to this
day; very long ago the Persian poet sang his fancy—
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head.
Though in the latter case, when one thinks of the great hyacinths of
the bulb growers, one feels them to be a rather unwieldy decoration for
the “lovely head,” and likely rather easily to be dislodged and fall to
the “garden’s lap.” But the original _Hyacinthus orientalis_, parent of
all our hyacinths, whether it came to us from Persia or from the other
side of the Himalayas, as Parkinson’s sub-name _zumbul indi_ rather
suggests, was a very different thing from the hyacinth of to-day. It
was a very small, poor thing, not so good as a poor specimen of the
white Roman hyacinth that blooms for us at Christmas. Even in
Parkinson’s time, when they had been cultivated in Europe for more than
fifty years, they were very far from the present hyacinth, indeed
nearer to the parent’s standard. “They have,” he says, “flowers of a
fair bluish purple colour, and all standing many times on one side the
stalk and many times on both.” A hyacinth now that is not flowered
equally all round is an unheard-of failure. And in number of florets,
too, things are considerably altered; a writer at the end of the
eighteenth century speaks of a fine hyacinth truss having from twenty
to thirty bells; now the average is from fifty to sixty, and one
specimen of the variety _Jacques_, bloomed in Haarlem, had one hundred
and ten. All this, of course, is the consequence of careful selection
and cultivation, selection and cultivation, and selection again, an art
in which the Dutch growers excel, and which is more successfully
manifested in the development of the hyacinth than in anything else.
Of all bulbs, hyacinths perhaps are the most typically Dutch; tulips
may have the greater name, but other western nations have an interest
in them and a tradition of them. We find them in our old memoirs and
tales; we see them on the embroidered waistcoats of the beaux of Queen
Anne’s court, and among the enamelled toys of the late days of the
French monarchy; they are figured in the prim paintings of our
great-grandmothers and on the cups of Dresden and Lowestoft china; they
even occur on the porcelain fragments that are discovered on the
far-off African coast, though probably there they are of Dutch or
Chino-Dutch origin. But a hyacinth, a big, full hyacinth, is
essentially and entirely Dutch; its very type and standard of beauty is
almost national, and nowhere else in the world can the bulb be produced
in perfection. In Ghent and near Berlin, in the sandy Spree plain, it
has been tried, but never with real success; the production of the
true, fine, and perfect hyacinth bulb belongs to the Dutch growers
alone.
The bulb, even now after all these years of cultivation, is no trifle
to produce, no untended child of a summer’s growth. It takes four
years, and care and understanding, to raise a marketable hyacinth bulb;
four years, or in some very propitious soils and circumstances,
possibly three. There are two methods open to the grower who is
producing hyacinths: either he slightly hollows the base of the bulb
from which he wants increase, or else he cross-cuts it in several
directions with cuts nearly half an inch deep. If he follows the latter
course, he must bury the bulb after cutting for a week, so that the
cuts may open and remain open. After that he will treat it as a
hollowed bulb is treated, that is, leave it alone in the dry warmth of
the barn, and in time there will appear between the layers innumerable
young bulblets, of sizes varying from a grain of rice to a pea. One may
sometimes see on the shelves of bulb barns the swollen and distorted
parent bulbs, the young bulbs distending all their coats, waiting in
the warmth for the time of planting. The parent, whether cut or
hollowed, is planted whole in this state, when a proportion of the
young bulbs take individual root and establish a separate existence.
When in July the bulbs are taken out of the ground the young ones are
found to be nice little bulbs of quite moderate proportions. Not yet,
of course, of saleable size nor of the blooming age; they want more
years of planting and lifting at the proper seasons before they are the
substantial bulbs of commerce. They flower before that time, sometimes
in the first but more often in the second year, but they have not come
to perfection, and it is not till they are four years old that there
may be expected the perfect, big, trussed flower.
Seeing the labour in production one wonders, not that hyacinths are “so
dear,” but rather that they are so cheap; also one feels that they are
hardly treated with the respect they deserve in England. “They,” so it
is often complained here, “do so little good the second year, and the
offset bulbs, when there are any, are so very poor.” But why not? Why
should not the offsets be poor? If under the hands of those who give
time, and experience, and understanding, they are only good after so
much labour, why should they be good without any trouble or labour at
all? And for doing well a second year, a hyacinth is as other plants,
it has its time of maturity, its gradual approach to it, and its
decline: it takes four years to reach its finest under this treatment;
afterwards it usually declines from it. The rate and style of the
decline will vary, but it is not likely to be delayed by the treatment
of the English amateur or in the English flower-bed. “It is,” so an old
grower once said, “as you may call the flower of one year, but what a
flower! It requires four years to make it, then there is the Flower;
after that—it is nothing, usually I would not say thank you for it. Ah,
but when it is there, it is indeed a Flower! One can respect that!”
In England hyacinths are not respected; the average English gardener
now wants something by the hundred for the border, he does not want
individuality. The old ladies who used to grow hyacinths in tall blue
and green glasses treated them with more respect. Hyacinth glasses are
not beautiful, yet one feels tenderly towards them for old sake’s
sake,—the memories of drowsy hours spent stumbling over _Easy Reading
for the Young_, in a room where the glasses stood on the window-sill
when spring had dethroned the red sausage-shaped draught excluder, and
the canary that hung between chirped as he peeped first at the white
flower in the blue glass and then at the pink flower in the green, and
possibly (at least in the stumbling reader’s mind) speculated as to
whether the ghostly roots to be seen through the glass were a rare and
horrible specimen of worm. Those hyacinths were appreciated, the first
opening of the flowers noted, the number of bells counted, the scent
enjoyed with neighbours not similarly blessed with bulbs. Now we do not
grow hyacinths in glasses. We, some people, grow them in pans, where
they look very like a small flower-bed moved into the house. Six or
eight “miniature hyacinths” (these are the immature offset bulbs of one
or two years’ growth) crammed in together, where, one would think, they
must be very uncomfortable, though it does not prevent them from each
producing a truss of flowers, smaller and looser certainly than that of
a mature hyacinth, but giving satisfaction to the uninitiated. Some
people grow hyacinths singly in pots, and stand them in rows on
conservatory shelves or about their rooms, where they look well if the
rooms are solidly Victorian, or furnished with beautiful specimens of
cabinet-work in satinwood and tulipwood. Your hyacinth is no modern, no
ornament for the furniture and rooms of _nouveaux arts_ or culture, and
it sorts very ill with half-toned æsthetics or the expensive
pseudo-simple. Possibly that may account for its being rather out of
fashion in England just now, where few people have a taste for the
solidly Victorian, and fewer still the money for the old satinwood of
the eighteenth century, or the exquisite tulipwood of France. Long ago
it was different; seventeenth-century England admired hyacinths
greatly, obtaining, then as now, all the really good ones from Holland,
where already they were extensively cultivated. The price fetched by
choice bulbs then was high, though never quite equal to that of tulips
at the zenith of their fame. Report speaks of £200 being paid for a
single hyacinth bulb in the middle of the seventeenth century; but by
the end of the eighteenth £25 was thought extravagant, even for a
choice florist’s variety. According to a writer in 1796, the price of
ordinary bulbs then varied from 3d. apiece to, in rare cases, as much
as £10. A fairly wide range, and one that is not so very dissimilar
from that of the present time, though it is probable we now have a
greater selection at 3d. and a smaller at £10.
Hyacinths in the bulb gardens of Holland are planted in September in
very heavily manured ground. In the winter they have to be protected by
a thick covering of straw, more, indeed, than is given to any bulbs
except some of the lily family, usually from four to five inches in
thickness. This is taken off in spring, when the crowns appear; it is
essential that they should not be kept covered too long or too closely
in mild weather, or the prematurely developed shoots will be too tender
to stand the night frosts of early spring. Hyacinths are subject to
some few diseases; one of them necessitates the removal of a suspected
bulb from among its neighbours. Sometimes one may see a procession of
men going forth to the hyacinth fields, each armed with a long narrow
tool, in shape a little like the instrument used for cutting asparagus
in Belgium; and also, if the weather is sunny, each carrying an
umbrella, an article much more used in Holland than in England. The
procession, to which the umbrellas give something of dignity if not
solemnity, moves slowly along a field, each man taking a row and
examining the hyacinths one by one for signs of the disease. With his
umbrella he shields the sun from his head and neck, the weather usually
seems to be hot on these occasions; with his tool he neatly and cleanly
lifts the suspected bulb from among its fellows.
[Illustration:
“IN EMERALD TUFTS, FLOWERS PURPLE, BLUE, AND
WHITE, LIKE SAPPHIRE, PEARL, AND RICH EMBROIDERY.”
]
Hyacinth flowers are cut off before their beauty is quite spent, so
that they shall not come to seed. Generally speaking, no bulb of any
sort is allowed to come to seed, unless of course that particular seed
is wanted for the raising of new varieties; to produce seed greatly
exhausts the bulb. Hyacinth flowers are cut close down to the leaves;
sometimes the cut blooms are scattered over the ground, where other
sorts of bulbs, as yet not showing shoots, are growing, this to prevent
the light sandy soil from being blown away, leaving the bulbs beneath
bare. Some few of the flowers are sold; some, I have heard it said, are
used for manure; but the great bulk of them seem just a waste product.
As yet nothing has been done with regard to extracting the scent from
them, though one would almost have thought it had been worth while. Of
course there would be difficulties in the way, the flowers have too
much moisture to allow of their being steam-distilled, like roses and
some other scent-providing flowers, and to pomade them, as violets are
pomaded, would be rather a costly process.
The hyacinth _Hyacinthus orientalis_, though certainly the great man of
the family, as parent of all that are commonly called hyacinths, is,
after all, only one of a group. Parkinson gives forty-eight “iacinths,”
as he spells them. Some of them, it is true, would seem to be only
varieties of the same kind, and some are things placed in other classes
by modern florists. Still, even without these, a good many remain, and
some at least are grown in the bulb gardens of Holland to-day. Grape
hyacinths (_Muscari_, because they were supposed to smell of musk) are
of these. They are a good deal grown in Holland, and are coming into
much favour in England, no one knows why. _Hyacinthus candicans_ is
also grown in Holland. This, of course, is a newcomer from the Cape,
unknown to Parkinson; its tall stalks and far-scattered white bells
give it little resemblance in appearance to the rest of its relations.
The wood hyacinth, _Nutans_, is also raised, but is usually to be found
under the heading “Squills” in a grower’s list. Parkinson classes it
with his iacinths, where one would have thought it belonged, calling it
_Hyacinthus anglicus belgiciis_. He also classes with them what he
calls _Scilla alba_—the common squill of the Mediterranean—the great
and important squill of old medicine, which, according to the
herbalists, must have been good for everything, epidemic, accidental,
and chronic, from worms to toothache, though most especially for
consumptive diseases. “The Apothecaries prepare thereof both Wine,
Vinegar and Oxymel or Syrupe, which is singular to exterminate and
expectorate tough flegm, which is a cause of much disquiet to the body,
and an hinderer of concoction, or digestion in the stomach, besides
divers other wayes, wherein the scales of the roots being dried, are
used. And Galen hath sufficiently explained the qualities and
properties thereof, in his eight book of Simples.” Pliny, doubtless,
explained something of the same, for he, too, wrote of squills. So did
that magnificent Dutchman, Clusius, who reports that when, in the true
spirit of inquiry, he was about to make personal test of the _Scilla
rubra_, he was stopped by the Spaniards, who assured him it was a most
strong and potent poison. It is to be regretted that the Dutchmen of
to-day do not grow the _Scilla rubra_, though perhaps it is not
unreasonable, for, according to all accounts, it was not much to look
at.
Among the flowers much more grown in Holland to-day than in former
times iris stands well first. The iris, of course, is an old flower,
even though it may have lost its first Greek name, and taken another
after that rather overworked personage, the cutter of life’s threads
and rain-bringer, Juno’s rainbow-winged messenger. Under various names
the iris, whether tuberous or bulbous, has figured a good deal in
history and legend. There has even been controversy about it, whether
Shakespeare meant an iris or a lily when he spoke of fleur-de-lys in
another than heraldic sense, and whether Chaucer did.
It is quite clear the old masters of medicine understood
“flower-de-luce” as iris, whether they spoke of “the bulbous blue kind”
or the tuberous “flaggy kind,” the white flag of Florence, from which
they, as we, derived orris root, and the common yellow flag from which
they derived other things which we do not. Their descriptions and
receipts for mingling the extract with honey to mitigate the sharpness
of its attack upon the stomach (!) have come down to us to convince us
that they knew the iris; also that they, such of them as survived, were
stouter men inside than their decadent descendants.
Of late years iris, dethroned from an honourable place in medicine, has
come much into fashion as a garden flower. Not without reason, many
sorts are easy for the amateur to cultivate, and all are very
effective. The variety among them is enormous; not only are there in
the hands of growers many comparatively new discoveries from North
Africa, Central Asia, Asia Minor, and South Europe, but the improving
and altering of all the families, new and old, has made the varieties
wonderful both in number and beauty now. Large quantities of iris are
grown in Holland, some of the rarer sorts and still more of the cheap
and well-known kinds. In June one may see fields of Spanish Iris (_Iris
xiphion_), exquisite, delicately-tinted flowers, quivering at the top
of their grey-green stalks. Blooming, as they do, when most of the
other bulb flowers are over, and when, in the early days of the
industry, most of the fields must have been rather bare, they have a
separate and special attraction. They are very nearly hardy bulbs, and
withstand the winter’s cold with little protection. They are little
trouble in the growing, and are lifted at the end of July, when the
greater number of other bulbs are already harvested. They increase
fairly well, and the young ones have the further advantage of coming to
maturity in a comparatively short time. New varieties, as is almost
invariably the case with bulbs, are obtained from seed. One may often
see small patches of new sorts, of which the grower has hope, flowering
beside large quantities of the established kind, this for the sake of
comparison, and to determine if the new is really new, and has anything
worthy of preservation. The original bulb of Spain is said to have been
blue flowered, the yellow influence coming from Portugal; but the
crossing and blending of the two, whether started by art or nature, was
begun too far back to be recorded. It is impossible to trace the
history of many of the innumerable and beautiful shades and blends that
exist now.
_Iris anglica_ is another striking feature of the bulb gardens in early
summer, coming into flower just when the Spanish are over, and
presenting a more gorgeous and striking effect. It is a native of the
Pyrenees, and no relation in root or anything else to the
tuberous-rooted flag-irises of England. The Dutch growers had it, in
the first instance, from English sailors or merchants, and either
mistook its place of origin or named it after the nation from whom they
received it. The flowers, with the extraordinary variety they show,
their somewhat stiff method of growth and great development, are
decidedly more typical of the nation of gardeners than of the nation
whose name they bear.
Among the irises, both bulbous and tuberous, now grown in Holland I
regret to say I have not been able to identify the iris of
Clusius—“Clusius his first great Flowerdeluce.” “This Flowerdeluce hath
divers long and broad leaves, not stiff like all the others, but soft
and greenish on the upper side, and whitish underneath.” The flower was
“of a fair blue, a pale sky colour in most,” and showed in the six
lower petals a tendency to turn up at the edges, the three smaller and
upper of these parting at the lip and standing up “like unto two small
ears.” The description of the flower reads a little like a Spanish
Iris, and the native place was clearly Spain; but the leaves sound
quite different to those of the Spanish as we know it, also the time of
blooming is placed too early. The flower is described as very sweet of
scent, and “the root is reasonable great.” Doubtless, towards the close
of the sixteenth century it was to have been seen blooming in the
famous garden at Leyden; perhaps some descendants are still to be found
in that city, yearly honouring the great man who named them, and helped
to make the city famous. But in none of the gardens round Haarlem have
I seen it, and in no grower’s catalogue does it figure, at all events
under its original name.
Irises, besides being among the latest of the bulb flowers, are almost
among the earliest. In early March one may see _Iris reticulata_,
_Bakeriana_, _histroides_, and a few other delicate-looking specimens
blooming in surroundings which look singularly unsuitable to them. But
these, as yet, are very little grown, are somewhat costly, and still in
appearance something reminiscent of their Asiatic homes. None of them
are recorded to be natives of Europe, although I myself have seen
irises surprisingly like _Iris reticulata_, which were found by their
present owner growing wild in Spain. They were, when I saw them,
blooming under a north wall in a garden not far from the Scottish
border, this in a March blizzard, and they had done so for some four
years in succession. In colour, shape, and scent they were exactly like
_reticulata_, but whether or no they were truly so I cannot say.
[Illustration: SPANISH IRISES]
Among the more striking of the flowers to be seen in Holland now, _Iris
susiana_ certainly deserves mention. It is not a bulb iris but a
spreading rhizome, in growth more like the _Iris germanica_, though in
appearance quite unlike. It was introduced into Holland somewhere about
1570, and has been grown there practically without development or
variation ever since, but the days of its market popularity are
comparatively recent. Twenty years ago it is doubtful if there were
fifty of the strange flowers (they look rather as if they were made of
Japanese newspaper) to be found outside the Dutch gardens. Certainly in
England they were then very little known. And yet Parkinson, writing in
1629, gives them an important place among the then known irises. There
can be no doubt whatever that the _Iris susiana_ of to-day is what he
calls the Great Turkey Flowerdeluce, “the roots whereof,” he tells us,
“have been sent out of Turkey divers times among other things, and it
would seem that they have had their original from about Sufis, a chief
city of Persia.” His description of the flower tallies exactly, and he
notes the peculiarity that the petals “being laid in water will colour
the water into a violet colour, but if a little Allome be put therein,
and then wrung or pressed, and the juice of these leaves dryed in the
shadow, they will give a colour almost as deep as Indigo, and may be
used for shadows in limning excellent well.” The flower of the _Iris
susiana_, if left in water or even allowed to rot in the ordinary way,
produces a very strongly-coloured juice of a bluish violet tint. There
really is no room to doubt that the two irises are the same, though how
it happened that the then and now valued flower went so out of English
cultivation, almost out of English knowledge, it is difficult to say.
One imagines that there came a time when no one appreciated its
“singularity and rarity”—the only charms it has to offer—and it was
allowed to die out. Without care, of course, it would not thrive or
increase. It seldom bears seeds in these colder countries, and the very
few that are occasionally borne never ripen. And it would hardly have
increased by spreading,—as a rhizome if left undisturbed for long it
would always die in the centre of every clump it formed, only living at
the edges, and in an unpropitious climate and circumstances it would
speedily dwindle away. Anyhow, it would seem to have happened, the
Great Turkey Flowerdeluce left us, to return _Iris susiana_ many years
later, when the tide of taste, which has changed many things and
relegated the formerly admired hyacinth to a secondary place, has put
all irises into fashion, and exalted this neglected flower to favour
and admiration. Such a fate has occurred before this to flowers and
books and men; to the books it matters little, they have time to ripen;
to the men—_post cineras gloria sera venit_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------