On 27 Oct 2009, at 15:18, Jim McKenney wrote: > Doesn't it seem unlikely that a commercial crocus grower would tolerate a > virus infected stock year after year? You would think that > commercial growers would be quick to get rid of virused stock... Well, maybe *you* would think that Jim, but as far as I've ever been able to tell, the Dutch bulb industry does not put the word "honest" in its ads looking for new employees. Misnamed bulbs from Dutch sources have been the target of complaints since the late 1940s; there's a moan'n'groan about it in an AGS publication from that time. (Maybe not the journal/bulletin, but one of the secondary publications.) In my younger, more naive days I used to point out to local garden centers that the corms they were selling of Crocus 'such and such' couldn't be true to name because the tunics weren't right. Eventually I awoke to the fact that the garden centers really didn't care, weren't interested, and weren't about to do anything about it, so I stopped. What I noticed repeatedly was that even if what you were getting wasn't true to name, it was a crocus of about the same color. It was common to see C. tommasinianus labelled as one of the blue chrysanthus/bicolor cultivars. Or you'd buy a yellow chrysanthus cultivar and get the huge Dutch Yellow instead. Most customers wouldn't care: they planted a bluey-purply or yellowy crocus in the fall and that's what flowered in the spring. My point is that the substitutions were done quite knowingly; these were no innocent mixups! So between persistent misnaming and sending out virused stock, I have concluded that the Dutch bulb industry is (to coin a phrase) a bunch of crooks. I admire the Dutch in many ways, but not in this regard. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island http://maps.google.ca/maps/…