The letter of 1913

In 1913 the second Walter Blom, a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, took charge of the nurseries, and set in print a warning to his customers that the family has never needed to improve upon:

“It is not possible to send out first quality stuff, or even a good article, at the mock price at which bulbs are often offered. We hope this hint may protect many flowerlovers from disappointment.”

Walter Blom, 1913

One hundred and twelve years later, the same promise went out again in nearly the same words: “A good bulb cannot be grown, lifted, graded and packed for next to nothing. The difference often becomes clear the following spring.” Adrian Blom, 2025.

The flight home, 1945

At the end of hostilities in 1945, Walter Blom was the first of the Dutch bulb growers to return to the United Kingdom. He was flown out by the R.A.F. bearing a gift of flower bulbs from the Dutch Government to the British people, in gratitude for the liberation of The Netherlands. It was from here that he set about re-establishing the business, and in May 1948 Walter Blom attained our very first Gold Medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

The year after that first Gold, in 1949, the same Walter Blom stood among the nine founders of the Keukenhof Gardens at Lisse, which opened the following spring to 236,000 visitors and remains the most famous bulb garden on earth. Our 1953 catalogue marked the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the beginning of another long association with the family firm.

Seventy times it was Gold

Each May the team left Bedfordshire for London and arranged some 20,000 tulips of more than 150 varieties through the night, then met back on the stand at three in the morning to make the final tweaks ready for judging at seven. At Chelsea the medals are left on your stand before the show opens, making for a somewhat anxious arrival on the Tuesday morning, “rather like waiting for exam results as a teenager,” as Chris put it. Seventy times it was Gold.

In 2022, after the uncertainty and postponements of the pandemic years, the first full show season in three years ended in Gold once more, “this year’s Gold was one of the most emotional,” Chris wrote. In 2023 came the seventieth, in the year The Sloaney reported that our tulips, Fly Away, Barbados, Cummins and Eyelash, “steal the show in the Great Pavilion.” The following spring, after 52 consecutive years, the family took the difficult decision to step back from exhibiting, “with mixed emotions,” as Paul told our customers, since so many now prefer to meet us in the more relaxed atmosphere of the tulip festivals. The seventy Gold Medals stand.

The literature and the cups

Anna Pavord dedicated The Tulip, the international bestseller on the flower that made men mad, to Ronald Blom; our family’s name is on its dedication page. Country Life records how “an enduring partnership was formed” when Ronald Blom met James Sellick at Chelsea in the mid-1990s, the beginning of what it calls Britain’s greatest tulip festival, at Pashley Manor.

In 2009 the Royal Horticultural Society awarded Ronald Blom the Peter Barr Memorial Cup, his name recorded in the Society’s official roll of recipients. In 2018, alongside our 68th Gold, the RHS presented us with the EH Trophy for the best cut flower display of any genera presented to the Society.

The festival gardens

At Pashley Manor in Sussex, spring displays have featured over 50,000 of our tulips throughout the gardens. At Morton Hall in Worcestershire, Gardens Illustrated notes the festival is “sponsored by Bloms Bulbs… it has to be show-stopping.” Constable Burton Hall in Yorkshire calls itself, in its own words, “the northern show garden for Chelsea award-winning Bloms Bulbs.”

Our garden and show associations have included Chenies Manor in Buckinghamshire, which we began supplying in 1980, Glenarm Castle in Northern Ireland and the Malvern Spring Gardening Show. And in 2010 our display opened Scotland’s first tulip festival, at Cambo Gardens in Fife.

In the archives

• Our 1932 Hillegom catalogue is preserved in the Oregon State University Archives; a 1939 edition still circulates among antiquarian booksellers.
• The 1965 and 1970–71 Watford catalogues are held by the Atlanta History Center.
• Ronald Blom’s Peter Barr Memorial Cup appears in the RHS’s official roll of recipients.
• Country Life on Britain’s greatest tulip festival, and The Sloaney on Chelsea 2023.
• More of the family story, including a BBC archive feature, on our About Us page.

Every bulb we sell is from the same stock as the exhibits that won those seventy Gold Medals. Shop the same bulbs that won at Chelsea →