HYACINTHUS. 
of all is H. orientalis, the delicate and lovely Lear of all the terrible 
mondaine (or elderly demi-mondaine) Hyacinths, immense frizzed 
women of the world, scented and unctuous and rather stolidly com- 
placent, that decorate every home in spring. Yet even these, in time, 
like Hall Caine’s heroines who wax fat on urban vice for a While and 
then remember the parental farm, and go back there to recover virtue 
on a diet of milk, will eventually, after a year or two of prostitution in 
pots, remember Hyacinth and the favour of the sun, and will even 
grow worthy of the rock-garden if put in some deep warm corner, 
where their stems will become slender with repentance every season and 
their blossoms renew the untarnished purity of their innocence. As 
for their father, H. orientalis, there is no bulb in the garden more 
absolutely a gentleman, and the darling of a god in all except that he 
does not die young, but continues for many a summer, never greatly 
increasing indeed, but yearly reappearing to greet his master with a 
delicate peal of pale-blue beils with which returning Hyacinth rings out 
in spring the doom of hated winter. And other Hyacinths there are: 
there is fat H. campanulatus, which in all catalogues is made to offer 
itself for planting broadcast in place of the dainty natural Bluebell of 
which it is so vulgarised a fattened caricature ; and there is H. cernuus, 
less known, but also less unworthy to understudy the Bluebell; and 
then there is H. amethystinus, which without legend, or rivalry, or 
comparison stands high among the loveliest bulbs we have, and yet is 
one of those most rarely seen, although it lives as long, and multiplies 
as readily, as Narcissus poeticus itselfi—the most exquisite of all bulbous 
delights for early summer, with colonies of decumbent grooved leaves, 
and 8-inch stems crowned with a spike of the most glorious and clear 
china-blue bells with a paler streak, and that wide mouth which is the 
one, the final differentiation between Hyacinth the open-lipped and 
smiling and Muscari of the dark face and the puckered lips and 
constricted pinched expression of bell. Of similar but not greater 
charm is lovely H. azwreus, which ought more properly to be known as 
H. ciliatus, a very beautiful thing from Asia Minor, with the lower 
bells deeply drooping and of deep blue, with their colour overflowing 
at the top into the tip of the densened spike of wide-open azure flowers 
almost sitting close to the blue stalk in a tight cone of blueness, on a 
stem some five inches high (or less) in February or March, rising up 
amid the grooved erect leaves of bluish-green. There are other species 
too, though many have betrayed their parentage and passed over 
into Scilla and Bellevalia ; of which H. lineatus, only some 4 inches high 
at the most, is the very companion asked by the choicest Daffodillings, 
in a carpet of Helichrysum bellidioeides. 
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