The Great Gladioli Revival

Big, brash, showy flowers went out of favour in the 1980s and with them went Dame Edna’s favourite, gladioli. But now they’re back in fashion, as Martyn Cox explains

- Martyn Cox

WHEN I first started as a garden writer, I would have been hard-pressed to find someone brave enough to admit that they liked gladioli. Back in the late 1990s gladioli were considered a floral relic from a bygone age, and most articles mentioning them tended to be dismissive. I admit I played my part in their persecution, labelling these tuberous perennials as ‘brash’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘unfashionable’.

A few decades earlier, I would have been run out of town for horticultural blasphemy. During the 1940s and 1950s, ‘glads’ – as my granddad used to call them – were the epitome of good taste, and it was impossible to walk down a suburban street in summer without passing several front gardens where an island bed was punctuated by an array of brightly coloured gladioli.

Ultimately, the overexposure of gladioli at this time, and the introduction of some garish, lanky varieties, helped lead to their fall from grace. Other factors played a part, not least a change in plant fashions that saw gardeners forsaking stuff grown by their parents and grandparents in favour of ornamental grasses, architectural specimens, foliage perennials and other ‘sexier’ introductions.

Yet if you wait long enough everything comes back into fashion – and that’s the case with gladioli. The gardening cognoscenti who once sneered at them have new-found admiration for the flowers, and millennials share pictures of their favourites on social media. The displays on show inside the Great Pavilion at the Chelsea Flower Show are greatly admired by visitors.

Elegant spires