I'd go to the specials alpine nurseries or one of the SRGC Shows.

Thankyou MG will do .

A chill now in the air.

Certainly, go to a specialist nursery and buy them growing in pots. Cyclamen corms hate being dried out, so the dry corms in packets bought from garden centers often don't come back to life. Pot grown plants are more expensive - but they are alive!
Cyclamen are quite easy to grow from seed although they will take several years to reach flowering size. Why don't you buy a few plants and some seeds as well.

Thankyou BBH I am on the case so to speak:)

Once they're settled in, Scotkat, hardy Cyclamen increase in numbers, but I find the seedlings pop up right on top of the parent plants. You could help dispersal by moving the seedlings to where you'd like them to grow, but, as Bulbaholic says, they take about 4 years to grow to flowering size.

There are hardy cyclamen in my local garden centres just now, in pots. Worth having a look locally?

Be careful, Ojibway. I have not seen these 'hardy cyclamen' but have heard that they are the old 'mini' cyclamen that used to be sold. These are a form of the house cyclamen, C. persicum, bred by the growers and are only marginally hardy. Safer to buy the hardy species such as C. hederifolium, purpurescens and cilicium for autumn and C. coum for late winter flowering.

Going back to my first response; when cyclamen corms are allowed to dry out they go into a deep dormancy and are very difficult to bring back into growth. So they are effectively dead.

I'm pleased to say that those I saw in GC were C. hederifolium but yes, Bulbaholic, I agree you have to be careful choosing these.

One caveat is to buy nursery grown bulbs. Bulbs collected from the wild are still available, and are still depleting the wild stocks of rare species.

If you buy growing plants in pots there is far less likelihood of there having been removed from the wild.