Online Bulb Sources for Canadian Gardeners
It's that time of year again, time to plant the daffodils, tulips, crocuses, and other bulbs that will make spring magical. Even though my gardens seem overflowing in summer, I always find room to put in more bulbs each fall!
The bulb companies know that I'm a sucker for a pretty bloom; they've been zealously sending me catalogs for months now. Mail-order catalogs are a great way to see bulbs in all their full-flowered glory ahead of time and find dazzling new varieties. But you can also do these things online, and some of the bulb-selling web sites are also interactive, to make your annual bulb search even more pleasurable.
Tulipworld.com, for instance, offers spectacular bulbs from crocuses through Crown Imperials, but also has many nifty interactive features that are actually useful for gardeners. The Garden Design wizard (in the Bulb Explorer section) makes it easy to find bulbs that are right for your garden conditions and that please your taste; all you have to do is choose a colour scheme and the wizard leads you through the flowers' appearance, style, and flowering period and displays the final choices with thumbnails and details. No more bookmaking multiple pages in your favorite garden catalog and endlessly flipping back and forth while you make up your mind! If you have particular features of a bulb in mind, such as scent or flowering season, or want bulbs that will naturalize well, Tulipworld's Flower Wizard will find the bulbs you want. And their online catalog is sortable; for example, clicking on the header 'Flowering Season' sorts the bulbs by blooming time, an incredibly handy feature for garden planning. Tulipworld is in Holland (where else?) but does ship to Canada, so if you see something you like (and you will!) you can order it online.
For many years now, I've ordered bulbs from Breck's, because of their impressive quality of their bulbs and their superb guarantee. One year when we had first moved into a new house, I ordered 50 tulips, none of which came up, because I had unknowingly planted them in a "flood" zone! When I let Breck's know about this, they refunded the full amount of my order, no hassles, no questions asked. Now there's a guarantee!
Unfortunately, if you want to order bulbs from Breck's, and you live in Canada, you're still going to have to use their catalog and your phone, as far as I can tell. Only the American version of Breck's seems to be online. They sell their products online through mySeasons, and mySeasons has no Canada-specific ordering. If you visit mySeasons right now, you'll find this especially frustrating because they're having a big fall bulb sale! !! Ugh! Maybe all of us Breck lovers should start an email campaign letting them know that we'd like to be able to order online, too.
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