With tall spires of colourful flowers, ideal for cutting, gladioli are very popular. They are easy to grow and the flowers can be bright or pastel shades. They are an easy way to add colour and height to your summer garden.
Gladioli are not reliably hardy so they are usually lifted and stored in winter. Gladioli grow from corms and these are slightly odd in that the corm you plant shrivels up and is replaced with a new one on top, as well as masses of small cormlets. If you lift them in autumn you can clean them and keep just the healthy new corms and discard the small cormlets that you won’t need. But we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. Let’s go back to your visit to Nag’s Hall and your purchase of new gladioli corms.
Although gladioli usually bloom in August, different varieties bloom at slightly different times. You can also influence flowering time slightly by when you plant. You can start to plant in late March, where they are to bloom. But if you plant some later, at the start of May, they will flower slightly later. Each corm produces one fan of leaves and one flower stem.
You can plant them in a row in the veg garden or in a clump in the border. Plant them about 10cm apart and 8-10cm deep.
I prefer to buy separate, named varieties but you may like to buy a mixed bag. But a word of warning: in most mixtures the different colours will flower at slightly different times so you are unlikely to get a display like the picture on the pack.
You can grow gladioli in pots of multipurpose compost but bear in mind that the corms will only bloom for about two or three weeks and they are tall, so the pots may blow over. But you can also grow them in pots, putting the corms closer together, and plunge them in the border, just as they are blooming, to inject some extra colour into the garden. It also makes them easy to lift in autumn.
So gladioli are adaptable and easy to grow, have few pests and will add some zing to your borders. Pop a few in your trolley on your next visit.
I can’t leave the subject of gladioli without mentioning one of my favourite summer bulbs and possibly my favourite flower fragrance of the year! Look out for packs of Gladiolus murielae, also known as Acidanthera or the Abyssinian gladiolus. Basically a very slender gladiolus, this produces elegant, swan-necked, flowers of pure white, each with a chocolate blotch, in September. It likes sun and warmth and needs a fairly long growing season so I always start them in 15-18cm pots, packing ten in each, about 5cm deep. I start them into growth in early March so they are already 15cm high when I plant them in the border, as a clump, in mid May. You can plant them direct in the garden too, in late March or April but they will flower slightly later. I also grow a pot in the greenhouse and bring them into the house when in bloom so I can really enjoy their perfume. The flowers are most fragrant in the evening and, while the perfume is difficult to describe, it reminds me of ‘Ambre Solaire’ sun cream so a sniff takes me back to summer holidays of my youth. The plants grow to about 1m high and are good for cutting too.
It is usually said that you can’t keep them for a second year, and they are cheap enough to buy, but, as long as they are dried and stored free from frost, I have found they will bloom again though, like all gladioli, they produce lots of tiny cormlets that won’t bloom for several years.
But whether you want to go to the trouble of keeping them or not, I really recommend that you give these a go this summer for their elegance and gorgeous perfume. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Next week: cannas and your spring gardening tips for the week