EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 234, 1 September 1938, Page 13

EUROPE TO-DAY

TULIPS AND HYACINTHS. Turning our backs on the Zuider Zee, but let us look out over countless acres of glowing, living colour. This is Tulip Land and Hyacinth Garden, and here are sights to amaze us—the dull earth breaking into sunset colours, a narrow waterway gleaming between the patterns of this huge carpet, a few lordly windmills keeping watch over the riches on every hand. There is no end to Holland’s patchwork quilts of bulbs from which buried splendours are exported to the _ ends of the earth, millions upon millions of dry husks which give birth'to rainbows. To-day hyacinths are gathered from level fields which were once six or seven feet under the Haarlemmermeer, an inland sea where in the 16th century the Dutch —those Beggars of the Sea—fought the Spaniards. Draining began last century and was com-

plcted about 1853, and now the bed of the sea is a flower bed, gorgeous when the colour-films spread far and wide.

Wandering among tulips when the huge fields are blazing with crimson chalices you will see the bulb-growers mowing them down with sickles—for them the bulb alone 7s the thing, even though they are knee-deep in “King Harolds” and “William Pitts,” or almost lost among “Fairy Queens” and “John Ruskins.” You may have read of the Field ol the Cloth of Gold, but in Holland (says between Haarlem and Leiden) in April the words come true' —though in addition the soil wears royal robes of exquisite and exotic beauty, all the cornation splendour of purple, crimson, scarlet, and gold. The days of the tulip mania have gone, but it is only recently that a Dutch tulip grower confessed to sitting down to a dinner which cost him over a thousand pounds—his cook had mistaken some of his most precious bulbs for onions, and served them hot with sauce! —(G.)