50 DUTCH BULBS AND GARDENS 



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 



