Crocuses are not much grown in the immediate vicinity of Haarlem, the land there is too valuable to be devoted to the inexpensive bulb. Many thousands come from Hille, some small growers there make a speciality of them, and grow little else; it is they who supply the big men who supply the markets. There would seem to be about eighty-three sorts of crocus now, which is something of an increase on the six sorts which “Robinio of Paris, that painful and curious searcher after simples,” sent to Gerard. By Parkinson’s time there appear to have been thirty-one sorts known; but they had begun to cultivate bulbs in earnest in his day, and to them it would have been more a matter of interest than surprise to see our varieties, all of which, on the authority of the grower, it is said, “have been derived from (grown from seed of) the original _Crocus vernus_ of South and Central Europe.” When this crocus was first introduced into Holland it is not easy to say. Nor is it easy to discover “when” (in the words of the same grower) “cultivators and amateurs began to hybridise the different forms”—nor yet when there first were different forms of it to hybridise; certainly it happened very long ago. There is a tradition that the saffron crocus (_Crocus sativus_) was introduced into England in 1339. Hakluyt speaks of its being brought by a pilgrim who, appreciating the sovereign value of the plant, and “proposing to do good to his country,” carried home a root hidden in his staff, which had been made hollow “of purpose,” though whether for the purpose of carrying saffron or anything else of value or interest he could pick up, is not clear. In either case the proceeding is rather typically English, as also are Hakluyt’s further remarks on saffron growing. He regrets that it has become a failing industry in these days, when many sturdy fellows are without work, and suggests, even as we suggest the revival of sundry curious things, that it should be revived for the benefit of the unemployed, who then, as now, were a cut-and-come-again problem.
It is interesting to notice that the older writers include all crocuses and colchicums under the name saffron, not meaning, as we do now, only the _Crocus sativus_. This crocus, and other varieties of autumn-flowering ones, are grown in Holland; the delicate flowers, beautifying some few fields when the rest are, for the most part, bare, give to them almost a look of spurious spring. It was no doubt this spring-like look of the autumn flowers which inspired the legend that they first appeared in fields where Medea spilt some drops of the magic liquor she had prepared to restore Æson to the vigour of youth. No doubt also it was this, and the fact that, reversing the usual order, the seed heads come in the spring, that gave them their old name, “Sonne-before-the-father.”