BEAUTY ON THE SCRAP-HEAP

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 223, 20 June 1925, Page 20

BEAUTY ON THE SCRAP-HEAP

WHERE FLOWERS ARE THROWN AWAY

Every time a woman comes to the door of niv house in the suburbs to sell me 12’ daffodils for a shilling or 12 tulips lor half a crown I shall think of Hillegom in Holland (says a writer In the “Daily News”).

There are enough hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, jonquils and what not in this neighbourhood to present every family in Great Britain with a large bunch. At the present moment hundreds of men arc occupied all day long throwing the flowers away! A few hundred miles away in England housewives are paying real money for flowers. Here they arc being consigned to the rubbish heap by the million.

One of the growers showed me a set of little booklets. They contained the panics of hundreds of growers who have signed contracts not to sell flowers. The list of the men who won’t sell gladioli flowers occupies some 70 pages of a booklet. The narcissus and tulip books are as big. “We sell the bulbs only,” he said, in answer to my puzzled questions. “If we sold the flowers we should be in competition with the growers to whom we sell bulbs. Therefore we throw our flowers away. We pluck off the bloom, leave the stalk and leaves tor a month in the ground in order to improve the bulb, then the bulbs are dug up and dried.” In the corner of nearly every field is a heap of spring blossoms, sacrificed to the Moloch of the flower world. Great piles of scarlet, white, cerise, and blue florets stripped from the hyacinth beds lie shining in the sun, sending out waves of heavy perfume over the flat flower country. In a field nearby ten men and two women are steadily working their way through a field of exquisite blue hyacinths. The blue in the brilliant spring sunshine has that unbelievable colour of lapis lazuli. It is level, even, perfect in colour, overpowering in scent, and incomparably lovely.

The men run the fat, sappy stalks through their fingers, strip off the florets, and throw them into baskets. One corner of the field is stripped of its glory already. When the sun goes down, the heavenlv blue of that field will have passed like the blue of yesterday’s sky. All that will remain will be a scented heap of blossom piled in the bottom of a barge or in the corner of a field. The bulbs have been sold. The flowers were useful to show the buyers the excellent quality of the bulbs' he was getting. Once that function was fulfilled, the stalks were doomed to be stripped. The buyer, of course, will take the bulbs, and cultivate them either for their blooms or to propagate more bulbs from them. But this grower’s name is among the contract signers. He does not sell flowers. He throws them awav. ■

I have always been taught that flowers are sacred things. I can hardlv bear to throw them away, even when they die. I will never recover from the. shock of meeting a community which lives by throwing flowers away.