Was anyone surprised to see my post listing this plant as a “bulb?” If you’re an outdoor gardener in a cooler climate, you might have planted its smaller cousins in a shady spot.
With my heavy clay soil, cyclamen corms just rot away and don’t even come up in the spring, nevermind naturalize in the lovely drifts that I have seen in other gardens.
For that matter, this plant doesn’t do particularly well in my home. I am not entirely sure why. It’s certainly cool enough.
It may be my watering practices and the fact that it is a corm (which is a bulb-like structure. Crocuses are corms if that helps you visualize).
All “house plants” that grow from bulbs–calla lilies and caladiums are just 2 more examples I can think of–need to be kept evenly moist. Once bulbs dry out, it tells them to initiate dormancy.
In my house, I am not so good with “evenly moist.” So I suspect that’s why I fail with these. But they are lovely to look at for the season.
Gardendaze 
When I was a kid, these did quite well in the garden. They foliated in autumn, bloomed all winter, and then died back in the warming spring weather, only to repeat the process the following autumn. However, I have not been able to grow them in pots. They rot too easily. They are grown as cool season annuals here, and get discarded at the end of winter. It is such a waste. They are so expensive.
Well in a sense, it’s no different from all the folks who get those glorious poinsettias and promptly discard them on January 2. Many of those cost far more than a cyclamen. However, I hate to fail with anything. And if you could see the glorious poinsettia in my office–from last face–just now starting to turn red….
Karla