a warning about bulb catalogues

I got this from a specialist bulb forum I belong to re the latest Peter DeJager catalogue

Yesterday's mail brought the catalog for Peter DeJager Bulb Co. The catalog is two parts; the first a slick color brochure of 16 pages illustrating about 560 postage-stamp-size bulb flowers; the second part is a pretty home made price list that's a bit hard to follow. No further comment on part 2.

Part one-the color brochure is pretty neat to see all those color pictures across the pages. Being a it of a Lycoris nut (I said 'a bit!!") I went to those pictures to see if they were actually selling L. chinensis or L. aurea as these are often confused names. There are pictures labelled as L. radiata, L. squamiera and L. aurea at the top of the page. Looking closely I wasn't certain of the ID of L. aurea, looking more closely the color of L. squamigera seemed far too pink.

Then it Struck me - GASP!!!

The three different species were actually THE SAME PHOTO- two mirror images and 'Photoshop'-colored to fit the name: Red L. radiata, Bright pink , reversed L. squamigera and Yellow L. aurea reversed back!! Absolutely identical pictures, totally computer manipulated. Then I wasn't sure that any were actually the species they named.

Mark, as you may have noticed we have VERY few Irish companies listed in the Watchdog - only three by my count, seven from teh Netherlands (mostly bulb companies, no doubt) and only 84 UK-based companies.

I'd love to have more companies added, so if you have some favorite mail-order/internet sources, I'd be glad to create the entries. And if you know of some that are less reputable, we should add them as well - it will at least allow those who have been burned to publicly report the problem, and hopefully prevent others from suffering the same fate. If you'd prefer to email me, that would be fine :)

Ok I'll sort something out

and here is another one

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I notice that the High Country Gardens catalog admits that one of their garden packages - not bulbs - is a photo montage. And as for the colors they think up to paint the crocuses - there was one catalog I got recently that showed some fall species as bright rose pink.
end quote

Also any catalogues that send seeds to Us still. I have Chilterns ans T$M.