HYACINTH OR IRIS? 55 



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 satin wood 

 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 

 aesthetics 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 



