Ben Zonneveld wrote: “This one keeps repeating. There are no broken tulips on sale that are caused by virus The ones for sale are all just tulips with two or more colors. Only in the old days ( 100 Years back) virused tulips were in vogue.” Ben, are you sure? Although it is true that broken tulips do not appear in the catalogs of most bulb dealers, there are brokers in several tulip growing countries who sell bulbs of broken tulips obtained from the Hortus Bulborum in the Netherlands. The cultivars in question are said to have been in cultivation for a long time, sometimes hundreds of years. I grow a number of these in my garden now, and off and on during the last nearly fifty years have grown others. The tulips I’m talking about are not the so-called Rembrandt tulips advertised in catalogs, tulips which fit your description of “just tulips with two or more colors”. The tulips I’m talking about are sold with the warning that they are virus infected; they are cultivars which are relatively stable with the virus infections but which can pass the virus on to other plants. They grow much more weakly than typical garden tulips; the flowers are smaller than garden tulips of the same general type, the petals often are slightly distorted and sometimes patches of mold develop on the petals. I’m running a garden here, not a laboratory, so I have not done tests to see if they really are virus infected. Here are images of two I grow currently: http://jimmckenney.com/two_broken_tulips.htm Ben, can you please check with your sources to confirm that these broken tulips from the Hortus Bulborum are not virus infected – and let us know? Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/