The Dutch people are a race of painters. Even the Hollander who has no gift for the painting craft possesses the love of color. He turns his garden into a canvas and, using flowers for paints, enlists the aid of nature in composing a picture. The nursery is his palette; no artist ever found a richer selection of colors in his paint-box. The Dutch garden painter adheres to the style known as stippling or dotting; he does not mix his colors, but achieves brilliance by their juxtaposition.
His flower picture is not a still-life scene; it is a kaleidoscopic picture, exhibiting a succession of imperceptibly changing phases, a fading of fierce canary yellow into pale lemon, a bursting of green buds into fiery-red blooms, a dimming of bright blue into faint lilac, a shifting of the high spots in the color scheme from one side of the picture to the other. Hence it never bores by monotony, as does the stereotyped painting of fruit and flowers in the dining room. The family, indeed, have long since ceased to notice the still-life over the sideboard. For the picture that draws their eyes is a living one, framed by the wideopen garden doors, and constantly painted afresh by the successive seasons of the year.
The florist round the comer sells hyacinth bulbs in fancy jars of colored glass. The jar bears a faint resemblance to a lady of the Directoire, whose bell-like skirt gathered up below the breasts is suggested by the coneshaped base that holds the water, the bust by the curving rim and the head by the bulb that crowns the whole. In the warmth of the living room or of the sunshine on the window ledge the bulb will shoot its roots into the water and lift its chandelier above the jar.
I do not care for the hyacinth in such a setting. It does not belong indoors. A single flower cuts a stiff and awkward figure, and a bunch of hyacinths makes a sullen, choked-up group, as if their own fragrance were too much for them. They look self-conscious in the presence of a vase of tulips, who are born aristocrats and know instinctively how to carry themselves in a drawing room. These bend their supple stems into graceful attitudes and tilt their heads intelligently, as if to catch each other’s fragrance, or in response to the vibrations astir in the room.
The hyacinth is made of coarser fiber. He is a soldier born, at home in the field, and at his best when merged in the mass, one of an army on parade. There are various regiments that can be distinguished by their uniforms. There are the whites, and the yellows, the pinks, and the blues, the lilacs, and the purples. They hold maneuvers once a year, towards the end of April or early in May. Those among my readers who can take the time off for a trip to Holland at that season will see a pageantry of military colors such as no other army can display.
Take your stand at the foot of the dunes west of the battle array. The wind in Holland is nearly always from the west, and if you let the army charge in your direction with the wind behind it, the overpowering scent of hyacinth might fell you to the ground. At the foot of the dunes you are safe. See how they are arrayed in serried ranks, each regiment a solid block of color and ready, it would seem, to charge that peaceful village in the distance. Its cottages seek shelter behind hedges and under the shade of spreading trees; and above that cowering scene a windmill lifts its cross against the eastern sky as if in prayer for peace and safety. The sun breaks through the clouds and sets the colors of the regiments ablaze. The west wind rises and blows a trumpet call, the army bends under its lash into position for the attack. The spring maneuvers are on.
Once in ten years there are special maneuvers. They take place in May and usually cover an area of sixteen thousand acres. The hyacinths are not the only combatants. Daffodils and dahlias and tulips are good soldiers too and make a brilliant showing in their bright yellow, blazing red, and dark purple uniforms. The parade grounds are established at Groenendael, once a private estate and now a public park belonging to the village of Heemstede. These special maneuvers were last held in 1935.
An army of tulips, five hundred thousand strong, lined up, on that occasion, in front of the General Staff’s Main Hall and played a symphony of colors against a background of foliage and fountains. Experts from abroad were invited to come and review the floral parade. A delegation from the Horticultural Society of America sailed on the Holland-America liner Statendam to attend the military show. They nearly arrived too late, for there never was an army more impatient to show off. The daffodils in the fields around the village of Hillegom were reported to be marshaling for the parade by the time the party embarked at Hoboken. The oldest inhabitants of the region could not remember such an early turnout. The mild winter was to blame for this impatience. The troops in their subterranean barracks were scenting the spring breeze and the sunshine, and rose from their beds with flying colors ahead of time.
Within easy motoring distance from Heemstede is the village of Aalsmeer. On a visit to Holland, a few years ago, I revisited its flower gardens. I retained but vague recollections of earlier visits. The place itself stood out less clearly in my mind than did the steam launch that used to take us there, and the treat of strawberries and cream which for children was the chief attraction of the trip. For in those days, half a century ago, Aalsmeer strawberries were famous, and when they were in season an excursion from Amsterdam to Aalsmeer was a delight for young and old. We used to stop at the sign of De Drie Kolommen (The Three Columns), where we could sit by the water’s edge in a garden at the back of the house and watch the little boats with fruit and vegetables for the Amsterdam market glide past while we relished our strawberries and cream.
The Three Columns still stood in the same place, but Aalsmeer looked different. It had risen high above its former station. I should insult it now, I felt, if I went there for the sole purpose of eating strawberries and cream. Aalsmeer has outgrown strawberries and grows roses instead. One goes there now to feast the eye, not the tongue, though I must admit that I ate an excellent luncheon at my old haunt De Drie Kolommen. The meal was only an incident in the adventure of the day, which was a quest for color and fragrant beauty. It was the season of roses, begonias, and dahlias; the chrysanthemums were just opening into bloom.
About four million rose bushes are grown under glass at Aalsmeer, and about half that number in the open. There were the dark-red Hadley, one of the most fragrant varieties, the Golden Ophelia, the pink Columbia, the salmon-tinted Aspirant Marcel Rouyer, the creamywhite Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, the yellow Souvenir de Claudius Pernet, the copper-colored Wilhelm Cordes, and several other varieties without other blight or blemish than their names. “Give a rose a bad name and cut her,” seems to be the slogan of these nurserymen. They cut roses by the millions in Aalsmeer and ship them by airplane to Bremen, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Malmö, Hannover, Berlin, Frankfurt, Basle, Brussels, Paris, and London. Schiphol, the Amsterdam airdrome, is only a few miles’ distance from Aalsmeer. The flowers are taken there by trucks, transferred into the planes with little delay, and reach their various destinations within four or five hours almost as fresh as when they left the nursery.
The rapid growth of aviation in Holland has made Aalsmeer the cut-flower market of all Europe. The rose especially has benefited by this winged transport. Lilacs used to be the chief product of Aalsmeer some years ago, but they are too heavy for transport by air. Hence, in 1928, the rose, for the first time in the history of Aalsmeer, yielded a bigger profit than the lilac. In that year the number of cut roses sold in the Aalsmeer market surpassed that of the previous year by more than seven million.
Lilacs too heavy for transport by air? It does sound incredible. But if you could see them in bloom in the Aalsmeer hothouses, you would believe it. They are the chief pride of the nurserymen. For nowhere else will lilacs flourish as they do in Aalsmeer. They thrive on the mud–bagger they call it in Dutch–which is dredged from the bottom of the Groote Poel, the Big Lake, whose edges are fringed by the nurseries. When you look down upon Aalsmeer from an airplane, the flower gardens look like square little islands dotting the mirror of the Groote Poel along its frame. As each nursery is surrounded by water, the flowers are carried to the auction house by boat. The barges with their fragrant cargoes slip noiselessly into the very center of the spacious building, where the flowers, in great sheafs, are transferred to movable counters, which one by one are wheeled into the auction room.
You cannot hear yourself bid here, not on account of the noise, but because the bids are not made by word of mouth. No sound is heard in this model salesroom except the voice of the auctioneer. He holds up a bunch and appraises it. As long as there is no bid, he keeps lowering the price, until a buyer strikes the bargain. This is done by pressing a button in front of the buyer. Facing the audience is a huge dial, studded with little electric bulbs, as many as there are seats in the amphitheater opposite. The bidder, by pressing the button, lights one of these bulbs and thus reveals upon the dial a number corresponding with the number of his seat. At the same time the hand of the dial indicates the price at which the item has been sold. The first bid is a purchase, no outbidding being allowed. Thus with the least noise and the least loss of time, tens of thousands of flowers are sold in a couple of hours.
There are two of these auction houses in Aalsmeer, each the property of a coöperative society of nurserymen. These societies accommodate their members with money loans for the purchase of tools and supplies, repayment being made by deductions from the proceeds of the sales; they organize collective exhibits of Aalsmeer nursery products at international flower shows; they subsidize horticultural experiments, and award scholarships to students in the Government College of Horticulture at Aalsmeer.
The daily auctions which are held under their auspices attract hundreds of buyers to the village, causing a continuous stir and traffic strangely in contrast with its usual rural quiet. Coöperation is the very lifeblood of Aalsmeer’s garden industry: the nurserymen have their own employers’ union, they have a common garden for experimentation purposes, they run their own coöperative bank, and have formed a society for the collective purchasing of horticultural supplies; the exporters of cut flowers are coöperatively organized; the graduates of the Horticultural College have their Alumni Association. All these coöperative organizations are held together by one inclusive organization, the Aalsmeer Horticultural League (Aalsmeersche Tuinbouwbond), whose secretary is the busiest man among the seven thousand people that make up the village population.
