l82 



GARDEN CRAFT IN EUROPE 



The cultivation of flowers, and especially of tulips, has always been a 

 considerable industry in Holland, and according to Loudon is believed to 

 have originated as early as the twelfth century. Lotel, in his preface to his 

 Htstoire des Plantes, 1756, states that the taste for plants existed among the 

 Flemings during the Crusades, and under the Dukes of Burgundy; that plants 

 were brought home from the Levant, and the two Indies ; that exotics 

 were more cultivated in the Netherlands than anywhere else ; and that the 

 Dutch gardens contained more rarities than all the rest of Europe, until, 

 during the desolating civil wars of the sixteenth century, many of the 

 finest gardens were abandoned or destroyed. To-day a traveller by rail 

 from The Hague to Haarlem in springtime will pass field upon field of gor- 

 geous colour. In the seventeenth 

 century the competition to obtain 

 the rarer bulbs was very remarkable 

 and became quite a mania, thou- 

 sands of florins being lost in tulip 

 speculation. In 1637 ^^^ registers 

 of Alkmaar show that at a public 

 sale for the profit of the Orphan- 

 age 120 bulbs were sold for 9,000 

 florins, a single bulb fetching up- 

 wards of 4,000 florins. The writer 

 of a letter in 1 780 says : "Yesterday I 

 was in a garden where they showed 

 me The Emperor and Empress of Russia, the King of Peru, the Comte 

 d'GEyras, Madame du Bari, Donne Margarite, la Comtesse de Wassenaer, 

 le Baron de Cranendonc, the Prince Charles Frederic, and a quantity of other 

 most illustrious personages, which together they offered me for 100 sous. 

 However, I refused them, for all these grand persons were only oignons (bulbs). 

 Thus they honour here the different flowers and distinguish them from each 

 other [apparently at this date it was unusual to call flowers by other than 

 their generic names]. I bought a catalogue of flowers of one of these gar- 

 deners, which is a thing very curious for a foreigner, for it contains the names 

 of more than 6,000 bulbs of different kinds. The first sort is the double 

 hyacinth, amongst which is one, the beaute tendre, of which the price is 

 100 florins, the ' chrysolora,' 60 florins ; the Prince Guillaume Frederic, 



A SMALL AVIARY, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 

 FROM AN ENGRAVING BY D. A. CLEMENS, 



