Curious experiments have been made with hyacinths.
Two different bulbs are to be chosen, blue and white, for instance. Cut them perpendicularly down nearly through the middle, but being careful to avoid cutting into their central shoots (_i.e._ the future flower-stalk), then join together the two larger halves containing the flower-shoot, thus making one bulb of them, so that the two flowers should appear as arising from one bulb. Then, with a little moss wound round the closed joins, the made-up bulb may be put into the earth like any other. This usually results in producing two stems stuck together back to back, with one skin around them both apparently; and on one side comes out white flowers, on the other red or blue. Sometimes the colours get mixed, the colour of one flower shaded with that of the other, very rarely do the stems grow separate.
None of these experiments seem to explain how it is that a single hyacinth can produce a double (by seed raising), though perhaps in ten thousand seeds only two or three will come up double flowered; nor how it is that the double can be redoubled (through seed), and that once redoubled, the bulb is constant in giving off young bulbs with double flowers, which never again degenerate into single; nor will a single, in its offshoots, ever become a double hyacinth.
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 disease of various kinds as are other bulbs, and it does not die easily. It is the only bulb that still continued to command a high price twenty-five years after its first appearance; 100 florins were paid for a single bulb.
“Rien ne me Surpasse” is one of the most perfect blue, but it has such wretched, weak, faded, even crumpled leaves, one would think the poor thing was ill, but notwithstanding it produces a handsome, healthy-looking flower.