Bulbs
ABULB is the most fascinating thing in the world. It excites expectation, bulges with promise. Philosophers tell us that pleasure lies chiefly in anticipa- tion, not in fruition. A bulb is the very embodiment of anticipation. There is bestowed in it—for the garden lover—the lovely and by no means baseless fabric of a hundred visions. Heaped in the bowls and baskets of the dealer lies a fascinating melange of strange shapes, huge hyacinth bulbs, rugged and obese, tulips neat, plump, and brown, marvels of standardized mass produc- tion, crocuses with netted coats, scorpion irises with dropsical roots and tufts of green impatiently protruding, shapeless white ornithogalums looking more like small lumps of dough than the procreant cradles of beauty. They overflow the bowls and lie tumbled about, as though Nature's fecundity had communicated itself to the shop window. Who can resist buying when a five months' supply of the stuff that hope and imagination feed on can be carried away in a pocket and a shilling will buy, not a castle in Spain (for castles are troublesome things at best), but a Garden of the Hesperides ?
The wonder is not that men buy so many bulbs for their gardens, but that they buy so few. The explanation is perhaps that imagination cannot feed upon its own images, but requires some stimulus of the senses. If bulbs, like the books and pottery of fine shape, and noble landscape, and the cunning jars and enticing bottles of the provisioner, by which student and aesthete and gourmet are inspired to enthusiasm, could remain under observation, we, too, would remain inspired. But a bulb cries out for the trowel. Buried in the dark earth its magic begins to work. Beauty is being born in a thousand hidden chambers, but nought is visible, and what the eye seeth not the heart has difficulty in rejoicing over. Besides, the enticing plenitude and promise of Spring has disappeared from the seedsman's window, and its place is taken by tins of "dope" to kill slugs.
These, alas, are indestructible, but imagination is not. Only when Christmas has come and gone does the florist's window or the garden of some long-sighted- neighbour remind us that we failed to pay, at the proper time, the premium on our flower insurance policy.
All of which being so, it behoves us now, while it is time, to sally forth and buy all the bulbs that the garden will hold. And if we have no garden then there are hyacinth glasses and bowls of fibre or even, at a pinch, a starch box or so, in which our floral chrysales can be committed to some cool dark corner, from which in season they will come and take the winds of March and the mantelpiece of the drawing-room with beauty.
A day or two ago a friend whose attention had been caught by the phrase, said to me "Why Dutch bulbs ? " I explained that as far as I knew the bulk of them came from Holland, and he again wanted to know why. That was—and is—a harder question to answer, but the answer seems to be that the Briton, who excels at pro- ducing a highly finished article, superior to anything else of its kind, at a proportionately high price, has no flair for the mass production of a standardized article at a low price. Britons raise the wonderful new mam- moth daffodils and irises that you and I do not pay five pounds apiece for. The business of multiplying them exceedingly they leave to others.
The Dutchman, plodding fellow, does that to perfec- tion. There are three thousand bulb raisers in Holland, but only about two hundred exporters, while the expor- ters who grow all their own bulbs must number less than fifty. So it amounts .almost to a cottage industry there, but in this country the bulb growers can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Yet, with the possible exception of hyacinths, which are multiplied by a strange and intri- cate process of which the Dutch seem to be the sole masters, all the so-called Dutch bulbs can be grown to perfection in this country. Here then is a chance for the farmer "weary of hoping hopes for ever vain," and of waiting for a subsidy on wheat. Let him set aside an acre of his land and a proportion of ‘his manure and grow tulips or daffodils. No great difficulties or overhead expense are involved, and there will be no grasping middle- men to contend with. He will find a market already stabilized at prices that give him a good profit, and there is the supreme advantage that the unsold bulb of this year is put back in the ground and becomes two saleable bulbs next year.
It will be an added joy to the British householder hurrying home with a parcel of Spring beauty in his pocket to know that it will be British beauty, and that
Previous page
