cyclamen

I wish I had your problem. How dry is your garden, and does it get much shade?

I'm on gravel soil and live in the "sunny south" so the cyclamen are behaving quite out of character.

The gravel soil is actually very good. I know they do well in dry shade, but as a gardener I often found that they did extraordinarily well at the foot of west-facing walls. So I looked them up (many years ago now) and discovered that they are from the Mediterranean, Palestine, Syria, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and so on. So you are giving them absolutely ideal conditions in which to grow. They will be setting seed from every flower. So your only solution is to pick every flower as it occurs whilst continuing to pull up every little tendril as you see it in the gravel. I have a gravel path, the only place in which it grows happily and the last place in which I want it to be. I pull them all up and transplant them, and lose nearly all of them. All of the original corms I bought with me have died. They are determined to stay in the gravel.

I love them, wish I had this problem.

I love them too. They seem to do quite well on our dry soil but suffer from weed competition......nettles

I too wish I had the same problem.
After years of trying to get Verbena Bonasaris (sp ?) to grow in my garden I at last managed it only for it to seed all over a gravel path. I just do a detour.

I'd welcome some of your cyclamen in my gravel bed.

They prefer to self seed into the lawn and the cracks in the patio in my garden, and not in the wild bits where I planted them. I spend a long time moving them each year and am slowly winning.

Picking off the seed heads would be the only way to get rid of them I would think.

Thanks, all. Glad I'm not the only one. My lawn is also smothered in them, also sprouting out from under the brick borders. I tried bark chippings 6" deep on one part, then I was told they would really love those conditions. It's when they hide among my other plants and when I try to dig them out the corms are massive. As I have a quarter-acre garden you can imagine my problem. My daughter's taken to calling them triffids when she sees them appearing. I read somewhere that ants spread the seeds because they like the sugar.

Would love them to invade my garden! I have 2 cyclamen planted 10 years ago, no sign of them spreading........

Can I swap your cyclamen for my dandelions please? I have lots.
See, I am asking nicely.....