To go to the more distant gardens, it is well to choose the morning, if it is spring, the time of the bulbs which have made Holland famous. A windy time, this, in Holland, one well understands then the advantage of pollarding the trees. Also one understands the necessity of the high hedges or screens which separate the garden into squarish patches. They are sometimes of beech, more often hornbeam, they quite enclose the piece of land, only at each corner there is a square-cut gateless gap, which makes a large area, seen from a distance, suggestive of a gigantic maze. In hyacinth time they are, of course, quite bare of leaves, unless one counts a few yellow ones of last year clinging here and there, a beautiful sombre background to the astonishing vivid delicacy of the flowers. It is a wonderful sight, more especially when one stands among them—rows of wax pink hyacinths, each perfect and each set in its circle of bright green leaves; behind, the purple brown of the bare hedge; beyond, a glimpse of blue flowers, or pale yellow, or still more dazzling white. A sight wonderful when one stands among them, but also to be appreciated afterwards from a distance—preferably from the windows of the gardener’s little house. If the wind is very cold and den Heer is going to be very long in conference with the gardener, it is possible that, after a certain time, one can admire them more from within over such coffee as the gardener’s wife makes. A cup of such coffee, a footstool filled with hot charcoal, and a chair in the most shining kitchen possible to conceive of, are not to be despised, while den Heer, outside, talks about the cutting down of the hyacinth flowers.
To us who grow hyacinths in pots or in beds, where the failure of one is like a missing front tooth, the cutting down of the flowers seems almost a ruthless thing. We admit that it must be necessary, or it would not be done, but we feel that the men who do it ought to have some compunction about it. Though why they should be expected to feel it more than the mowers who cut the equally beautiful flowers in the English hay-fields does not appear. The bulbs in Holland are grown for their roots as much as are carrots and potatoes, as much as the grass is grown for hay. It is the poet, not the mower, who sighs over the flowers of the grass that perish; and the poet, if he happens to own hay-fields, does not hesitate to give orders for the cutting at the proper time. And the mower, if he has an eye for beauty, admires the flowers, even though he says nothing about it, and cuts them down to order. A boat-load of cut hyacinth flowers, with their beauty, and their scent, and their cutting off at highest perfection may touch the imagination more than a four-ounce bottle of heavy red-brown oil, which represents the life and fragrance of half a square mile of jasmine flowers. But it should not, if the jasmine was only grown that the oil might be made, the hyacinths equally are only grown that their roots may be fine and saleable; and when their well-being demands the cutting of the flowers there is no sacrifice in their going, for to this end they grew and matured and came to flower.