700 TONS OF FLOWERS FOR LONDON.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4435, 3 July 1922, Page 3

700 TONS OF FLOWERS FOR LONDON.

Is it generally known that seven hundred tons of fragile blooms have been transported this season from the tiny group of. Islands of SciMy, situated over 40 miles off tihe storm-fewepi: coast of Cornwall ? No leviathan of the ocean has done this; it hps all been done by one small, steamer, which has had to plough every day .through mountainous seas and terrific gales on one of the roughest and most exposed routes in the kingdom. The preparations for this wonderful crop were commenced just twelve months ago, and for the sake of brevity let us follow the fortunes of one kind of bl|pom. Soleil d’Or is the first polyanthus narcissus to arrive in Covent Garden Market as a general rule, and it is highly appreciated by the British public. All through the hot summer months we worked to supply Great Britain with flowers, to brighten her homes. 1 The drought, which caused untold* losses among agricultural communities as a whole, was just, what we needed to ripen our bulbs, and feverishly we worked to plough out all bulbs selected for forcing, so that full advantage might be extracted during the ripening process from the intense tropical heat.

The variety Soleili d’Or will stan i a lot of heat, but there came the psychological moment when overripening would retard top natural earlincss of the bloom —and then the staff of the forcing department were llet loose. Rapidly .and with unerring judgment, they selected the best forcing type of bulb, and in a very short space of time a quarter, of a million flowering bulbs had disappeared from the fields. Let us follow (hem. Thousands of boxes, made from timber grown on the islands, are placed in a field in heat, compact rows, and half filled with soil which has been specially prepared. The bulbs are then closely packed in the boxes, after which they are covered with a nice, warm covering of fine soil. The advent of warm showers soon causes active root action, and we leave them for a few months to get thoroughly established. At about the second week of November all the boxes are removed under glass, and gentle heat is applied, and by the time Christmas arrives the bloom is ready for market. All flower# are now in demand, pricer are high, and great activity takes place in SciMy, The stalks are ruthlessly pulled by labourers, who see only the commercial value of the proceeding, and the flowers are taken to a specially constructed packing and developing house. Here they are tied up in bunches of one dozen blooms and placed in long concrete tanks in a kind of rack through which the bunches are inserted with their stalks in water. Soon a marvellous change comes over the flowers, they become stiffer and larger, and the natural colour is intensified. They are now ready to undergo their long and perilous journey of just under 500 miles to London. At four o’clock in the morning the packers turn up with their lanterns, looking very picturesque as they swing along in the gloom, in their seamen’s clothes. Expeditiously the bunches are packed into boxes, whic.i are lashed together, weighed, and loaded on to a kind of Ibrry which we term a "wain.” The whistle of the launch is screaming out its impatience ; we are a little late and the tide is running out, but soon all is safely stowed aboard our boat by eight.of the clock. And we go home to breakfast, subconsciously aware of the dull roar of the Atlantic beating on our rocky coast, and mentally visualising the unromantic precincts ofi Covent Garden Market, and wondering how much the British public will be willing to pay for three weeks’ colour and brightness in the form of flowers from Daffodil Land.