Miss Nixon wishes me to present her humble duty and thanks to Her Majesty, the Queen of the Netherlands, for graciously honouring her with the permission to make drawings of Her Majesty’s Summer Palace and Gardens at Het Loo. Miss Nixon also wishes me to thank His Excellency Baron Sistema van Grövestins for his kindness in procuring for her the privilege of access to the Royal Gardens at Het Loo, and to thank the Rt. Hon. Sir Horace Rumbold, Bart., P.C., G.C.B., G.C.M.G., for his kind help. Her

Undoubtedly the way to go to the Bulb Gardens of Holland is to go the way by which the bulbs come to England. Or at least follow that route to a certain extent—the bulbs usually make part of the inland journey in their own country by canal boat, neither a very possible nor a very comfortable proceeding for the average traveller. But for the rest, their route is the one for those who have leisure and who want to get to the gardens in the most suitable way. One boards a little Dutch steamer at the

Winter in the bulb country is not a very attractive time, at least to the foreigner. The same possibly may be said of winter in England, though few healthy Englishmen, unless tied very tightly to town, admit it. Winter in Holland is long, and, more often than not, very cold. The canals are often frozen for a considerable time, when the easiest way to get about in the country districts is on skates. Nearly all Dutchmen are at home on skates; comparatively few are clever oarsmen, though one might

Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, accidentally met death at the hands of that god, through the interposition of jealous Zephyr. Apollo, after grieving for his favourite, cried to his blood: “Thou shalt be a new flower inscribed with my lamentations!” and immediately after, “Behold the blood shed on the grass ceases to be blood, and a flower springs forth more beautiful than Tyrian dye, and takes the same form as the lily, save that the lily is silvery white and this is purple. Phoebus himself write

Exactly what influences favour in flowers, or indeed in most other things, it is hard to say; no Dutch bulb-grower ever attempts to do so. It may interest the leisurely student of mankind to discover the causes and trends of fashion, but the grower asks little or nothing about it, he merely accepts the evidence of his carefully-kept books, and the character of the attention given to some certain flower or groups of flowers at the shows, and sets himself to supply the demand that has arisen, or i

The Tulip is the aristocrat of bulbs, the one with whose name is connected squandered fortunes, romantic tales, long history, and other attributes of traditional aristocracy. It is also the one which, more than any, has made Holland famous. To go to see the bulb gardens usually means to go to Haarlem towards the latter part of April, when the tulips are at their best and there are literally acres of flowers. A patch of seven hundred square metres of scarlet tulips, and beyond perhaps as much of

There is, without doubt, a certain charm in bulb barns; not perhaps quite the charm of an old English barn, wherein there is ever a brown twilight and never a straight line, and it is still possible to think of the Good People coming to shelter on wet nights. Dutch barns, even the least well kept of them, are too orderly for that. They are rather too foursquare and deficient in the unexpected annexes and the mysterious doors leading to nowhere and anywhere which are part of the true fascination

Saint-Simon, writing in the year 1768, declares there were at that time in Haarlem nearly two thousand named varieties of the hyacinth, and we may suppose they had already been about forty years in cultivation on a soil which seemed particularly adapted for the purpose,—a fine upper stratum of grey sand, superposed by the action of the sea on a thin subsoil of peat, so that Nature prepared, it seems, many thousand years in advance to produce the delicately-tinted and exquisitely-scented flower,

It has already been shown what sort of appearance the outer tunics present, and it has been explained how the tunics in general are formed. We are now going to push our examination further. After divesting the bulb of seven or eight tunics (or fans), one comes ( A ) upon a little thin flattened thread of crimson colour, like a line. It is, as it were, embedded in one of the tunics; it starts from the base of the bulb and rises to the extreme top. Continuing to take away again the same number of

Having thoroughly examined roots, leaves, and tunics, we now come to the organs of reproduction, and as the young bulbs form them themselves very oddly and irregularly at the base of the old bulb, it is very difficult even for a connoisseur to judge whether any little bulbs are coming, and still less can he foretell how many he may hope for. Sometimes they are numerous, and on single hyacinths twenty-four have been known to develop on one bulb, but on single hyacinths they develop very irregular

Although there is a way of propagating hyacinths by seed, like other plants, yet it should be known to all that it is seldom that a double hyacinth produces seed, and such a thing has not been known as a seed (from either double or single hyacinth) ever producing a species at all resembling the hyacinth from which the seed is taken. “La Perruque quarrée,” a red hyacinth, has produced “La Comète”—a very fine sort, and a splendid red, but it has no resemblance to “La Perruque quarrée,” and yet the

The various species of hyacinths, though apparently different and distinct, are essentially alike. Bulbs of one sort differ very little from those of another—the leaves are always alike, their stalks grow in the same way—their blossoms, though infinitely varied, are arranged in the same regular order—each connected with the stem by a little thread, called the pedicel. [4] The double scarcely differs from the single, except in the blossom. We have already followed the gradual course of the growth

In the cultivation of hyacinths it is impossible to keep to any fixed rule. Not only must every country and climate make its own, but every hyacinth has its own ways and customs, its own special qualities and characteristics. The most distinguished of their species exact a great deal of attention, care, and management. “François Ist” finds great difficulty in producing offshoots, and great care has to be taken of the young bulb, but when once arrived at full growth it is not as subject to diseas

Many, no doubt, have heard of the extraordinary mania for tulips in Holland in the seventeenth century. Dutchmen of all classes, highest to lowest, forsook their ordinary occupations and business, in order to engage in the tulip trade. It is said the mania began first in France in the year 1635, and thence spread to the Netherlands. Enormous prices were paid, and even houses and land given in exchange for one bulb. In Haarlem there stands a house, at one time in possession of the Widow de Lange

De Koning gives us an account of the hyacinth trade which began in 1730, and which continues to the present day. It was not so astonishing as the tulip trade, and though the price of the hyacinth did not rise as high as that of tulips, yet fancy prices were paid for some:— From these figures one can see that the price of a favourite hyacinth could not be compared to the price paid for a tulip bulb, but to this day hyacinth culture is a trade by which people can really live profitably (this was 1