Sick cyclamen in SF Bay area

I planted a large (and expensive) bed of cyclamen for the holidays. The first week or two looked great but then plant by plant the flowers began browning. Now the entire bed is a mess. Thought is was the week of freeze we had before Christmas but maybe it's all the rain. Cyclamen.com says not to over water. You think its rot from to much rain? Maybe the plants are planted too closely? At this point Imight as well replace the whole thing with something else. This is the one bed I update regularly.

Well, they are prone to rotting if they are kept wet. They need good air flow to stay dry, so if you planted them so close that they can't dry out, that could contribute. Are they in a raised bed that drains quickly, or - if they are planted straight into the ground - does your soil drain quickly? It sounds like you are aware of what went wrong... You could dig one up and see how the lower stems and roots look. That will tell you if they are rotting. And if those look good, we need to look at other causes.

Thanks for the insight CJ. I just got back form a family trip to Disneyland and they had a TON of cyclamen beds all looking beautiful of course. It was salt in the wound but of course their weather is a little different. It was like summer. Their trees were starting to bud even. I did notice DL had good spacing...no plants touching. I pulled one of mine this morning and it looks like the roots are happy - in fact the plant has lots of new flowers starting but the mature flowers are sickly. Not sure how airflow would effect the flowers on top but that must be it. No pests to be seen. The bed is raised and should drain well. In fact, I have a couple of pots crammed with cyc and ivy in them and they are happy. Its a head scrathcher.

Flowers do fade eventually even if you do everything right, it could be it was just their time to be finished. I'm not sure how long an individual cyclamen flower lasts, but assuming you bought them a couple weeks before the holidays and they were already blooming probably when you got them, it's not surprising that maybe their time is just up. Just the act of transplanting the flowers from the little pots they came in to your garden can also create some stress and cause the blooms to fade as the plant works on establishing new roots first. Or it could be all the rain and lack of sun made those flowers feel like it was time to be done, and now that the weather's nicer again, they're putting out new blooms.

They are cool weather plants, so when it warms up, they'll go dormant. Here, they come back when it cools down again, IF the drainage is excellent.

Sounds like what ecrane said, if there was no rot.