142 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



THE ENGLISH OR FLORIST'S TULIP. 

 By A. D. Hall. 



[Lecture delivered May 20, 1902.] 



It is not the object of the present paper to give any account of the 

 history or origin of the Florist's Tulip : this has already been done 

 in these pages by the Rev. F. D. Horner (Journal R.H.S. Vol. XV. 1893, 

 p. 99), by Mr. J. W. Bentley in the pages of the Journal of Horticulture 

 for 1894-5, and by Count Solms-Laubach in a short monograph (Weizen 

 unci Tulpe, Leipzig, 1899). It will be sufficient here to indicate that 

 the Tulip, when introduced by Gesner into Western Europe in 1559, was 

 already a florist's flower, with numerous varieties owing their unknown 

 origin to the Turks ; that it soon became a favourite flower and many 

 new forms were raised, Flanders rather than Holland being the chief 

 centre of improvement ; until about the beginning of the last century the 

 London florists, who had their gardens in the City Road, Camberwell, 

 and other unlikely places, began the creation of the English Tulip as we 

 now know it. It is rather the object of this paper to put before the 

 reader the florist's point of view as to what constitutes a fine Tulip — a 

 simple mystery perhaps, but one that needs a little more study than is 

 given to it, either by the one kind of critic who assures us that our standards 

 are all obsolete nonsense, or the other who tells how he goes direct to 

 Holland for his bulbs, and gets just as good stuff at 10s. a hundred 

 as anything we have to show. The latter gentleman is simply ignorant ; 

 the former is sometimes wilfully so, because he will only look at flowers 

 through the spectacles of a theory : to him we can only say that the 

 Florist's Tulip is the outcome of some three hundred years' work of 

 those who best knew and loved the flower. The excellences the florist 

 admires, the standards he demands, represent a tradition, not an external 

 arbitrary dogma, but the accumulated experience of many generations 

 of what will best bring the innate qualities of the flower to their 

 highest perfection. It is easy to raise a cheap clamour against formality 

 and to obtain the approbation of the unthinking public by decrying 

 anything that looks like line and rule in connection with flowers ; but 

 taste grows in flowers just as in the greater art of painting. First 

 comes the appreciation of a mass of colour, the trumpet call of so many 

 square yards of red or blue thrown violently at the spectator ; the next 

 stage sees the revulsion from the old crudity in an admiration of the 

 flowing curve, the indeterminate outline, the melting half shades, all that 

 is picturesque and quaint and artistic ; only at a later stage does one 

 awaken to the sense of pure form, the severer beauty that comes of 

 proportion, and the restraint of the grand style. A show of florist's 

 flowers, whether they be Roses, or Tulips, or Carnations, is a very artificial 

 affair and easily contrasted to its disadvantage with the beds of a garden, 

 or the trade 11 displays " of masses of inferior examples of the same sort 

 of flower. But to compare the two things is only to confuse the issues ; 



