Hyacinth has one bad habit when planted indoors.  This is the tendency to unfold its blossom too soon.  So the beautiful hyacinth blossom appears dwarfed and stunted close down near the ground.  To avoid this condition do not take the bulb from the dark until the leaves are about an inch to two inches above the earth and until they have spread apart.  This gives the blossom a chance to shoot up.  Tip the pot over and see if the roots are visible through the drainage hole.

The time to buy bulbs is in late August or early September.  After this bulbs through shrinkage depreciate in value; by which value is meant not one in price but in soundness and ability to produce blossoms.  Do not buy cheap or cut-rate bulbs.  Buy good, big, sound ones.

The Roman hyacinths are excellent for forcing.  They are small flowered, quite different from the large sturdy Dutch hyacinths more commonly planted.  In choosing hyacinths you have to decide upon the colour and whether you wish double or single varieties.  In general most people enjoy single flowers better.  If you are to use the hyacinths for outdoor planting or bedding it is perfectly safe just to write for bulbs which are to be bedded.  La Grandesse is a beautiful white; King of the Blues speaks for itself and the Sarah Bernhardt is a salmon pink.  These do well inside, too.  Charles Dickens is a fine rose colour, Prince of Wales, violet, and L’Innocence, a fine white.  These are good for inside planting.  Some may like the smaller Roman hyacinths, which do splendidly indoors.  Very good hyacinths are bought for fifteen cents.

Tulips do especially well outdoors.  A capital one for either bedding or indoor forcing is the Isabelle.  It is a beautiful red tulip which is bought for five cents.  The Summer Beauty, a hardy white tulip, is well worth the ten cents asked for each one.  Some of you may like to raise some freaks; then try parrot tulips at about thirty-five cents a dozen.  A thing to remember about the indoor planting of tulips is this—­tulips, more than other bulbs, are likely to have plant lice, so watch out!

In daffodils you may be sure of the Van Sion.  These are worth forty cents a dozen.  You can buy daffodils for twenty.

If you wish to lay in a stock of bulbs for water planting choose, of course, Chinese lilies, but try, too, the paper white narcissus.  These bulbs cost forty cents a dozen.  Buy from the five-and-ten-cent store a glass dish, and gather stones for it.  About three weeks before you wish blossoms plant a dozen of these narcissi in the glass dish with the stones as a foundation, and water enough to come up around the base of the bulbs.  It is a good plan to set the dish of bulbs in the dark for four or five days.

You can grow hyacinths in water too.  For this a special glass is sold, although I have seen children place a bulb in the top of a preserve jar.  It works all right.  Bulbs must never drop low into water or they decay.  These, too, should be placed in the dark for about a week.