HYACINTH, Hyacinthus, a genus of plants of the natural order bulbous rooted plants with co•olla-like, bell-shaped, 6-cleft perianth, six stamens fixed in the tube of the perianth, and dry capsular fruit.—The oriental hyacinth (H. orientalig), one of the most favorite of florists' flowers, is a native of Asia Minor, Syria, and Persia. It is now naturalized in some parts of the s. of Europe. It has broad linear leaves, and a scape with a raceme of many flowers pointing in all directions. The flowers in culti vation exhibit great variety of color, chiefly blue, purple, and white. They are very beautiful and very fragrant. The fragrance is strongest about or after eleven o'clock at night. Among cultivated hyacinths are many with double flowers. The hyacinth has been cultivated from a remote period, but ahout the beginning of the 18th. c., it attained almost the first place as a ilorista' flower: Great attention was bestowed:4n the produe tion of new varieties, and enormous prices were given for bulbs of some of them. A price equal to £200 sterling was sometimes paid for a single bulb. The principal seat of the cultivation of hyacinths was and still is at Haarlem. At present, however, more than £10 is seldom asked for the finest new variety of hyacinth, but although the trade is considered as now much depressed, the Haarlem gardeners still sell bulbs to the value of £2,000 or £3,000 yearly. Hyacinth bulbs, planted in pots, readily produce beautiful
flowers; and flowers almost equally beautiful are obtained—for one year, however, only —by placing them in water in hyacinth glasses, in which they form a favorite ornament of apartments in winter and early spring. The cultivation of the hyacinth in the open ground is much more difficult. New varieties are raised from seed. Several other species of hyacinth are natives of the s. of Europe, Africa, etc.—The GRAPE: HYACINTH and GLOBE-HYACINTH, frequently cultivated as garden flowers, are now referred to the genus muscari.—A common British plant, growing in woods and copses, with beautiful blue flowers very like those of the oriental hyacinth, but all drooping to one side (H. non-scriptus, also known as ASeilla nutans, lindymion nutans, and Agraphis nutans), is sometimes called the WILD HYACINTH, and sometimes the BLUE-BELL. The bulbs have been used for making starch.