A glad hand for gladioli

I LOVE gladioli, but I realise that many readers may not share my passion. Good taste has much to answer for. The corblimey gladioli you see in other people’s gardens are anathema to strict and peculiar plantsmen; so are dahlias and chrysanths. People like us don’t grow them. The only acceptable gladioli are the wild ones you see in Mediterranean pastures and olive groves.

- Charles Quest-Ritson

Very pretty they are, too, when they flower in April and the wheat fields are flecked with thousands of pale purple Gladiolus italicus. Mediterranean farmers, however, know that gladioli are noxious weeds that reduce their yields and are hard to eliminate without serious weed killers. Then there’s G. communis subsp. byzantinus, which flowers a little later, and G. illyricus, which is actually native to the sandy soil of the New Forest, although it struggles on this side of the Channel. All are exotic to the English eye.

The epicentre of the genus Gladiolus is somewhere in the fynbos of Cape Province, South Africa, which explains why they are too tender for most of us in Britain and have to be lifted and dried off in the autumn, like dahlias. They prefer full sun and a well-drained soil—sand or chalk is perfect. Gladiolus corms take about three months to grow and flower, so, one year, I spaced out their flowering by planting a few corms every 10 days or so, right up until early July. It worked, but was too much of a faff to repeat.