Haarlem being the capital of the tulip country, the time to visit
it is the spring. To travel from Leyden to Haarlem by rail in April
is to pass through floods of colour, reaching their finest quality
about Hillegom. The beds are too formal, too exactly parallel, to be
beautiful, except as sheets of scarlet or yellow; for careless beauty
one must look to the heaps of blossoms piled up in the corners (later
to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful,
and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the
flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts.
Tulip Sunday, which represents the height of the season (corresponding
to Chestnut Sunday at Bushey Park) is about the third Sunday in
April. One should be in Holland then. It is no country for hot weather:
it has no shade, the trains become unbearable, and the canals are
very unpleasant. But in spring it is always fresh.
Tulip cultivation is now a steady humdrum business, very different
from the early days of the fashion for the flower, in the seventeenth
century, when speculators lost their heads over bulbs as thoroughly as
over South-Sea stock in the great Bubble period. Thousands of florins
were given for a single bulb.
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