Inspire Me: Explore 11,000 blooms virtually with San Jose’s The Bulb Guy

It’s just a blooming shame the shelter-in-place lockdown denuded a special spring tradition in San Jose this year — the free tours of The Bulb Guy’s bounty of bulb-born blossoms, roughly 11,000 of them, in his quarter-acre San Jose home garden.

“The Bulb Guy” is actually Richard Santoro, a mild-mannered yet seriously silly cement salesman in daily life. But once in the garden, he becomes a deep-“seeded” petal pusher, planting tulips, daffodils, ranunculus, anemones, scalia, snow drops, irises, freesia “and some other stuff I can’t even spell or pronounce,” he says.