Hardy Gladioli

They’re tough, low maintenance and beautiful. Forget what you’ve heard about the classic tender gladioli, try the lesser-known hardy kind says Graham Rice

- Graham Rice

WE tend to have preconceptions about gladioli. We think of them as wildly flamboyant, which many of them are. We also think of them as tender – and yes, most of them won’t take much frost. And don’t they all need digging up and drying off in the autumn? Yes – most of them do.

But do you see where I’m going with this? There are also hardy varieties, often in softer colours, that we can leave in the ground all the year round, and some of them are the most beautiful of all. A few are even scented.

The dramatic gladioli of the flower show and florist, and which Dame Edna Everage made famous in the 1980s and 1990s, have been developed primarily as commercial cut flowers. And for cut flower growers what counts are the colours, plus the size and form of the individual flowers. We gardeners have other priorities.

Hardiness is a huge factor. If our gladioli will take a normal winter, left in the ground and not dug and dried off, then that makes less work. And growing them in clumps, with hardy perennials, looks better than growing them in rows for cutting. And because the flowers come in succession, there’s colour over a longer period.

From North Carolina and South Africa

Top of the list are the magenta-coloured G. communis subsp. byzantinus, which is not only hardy everywhere but spreads by runners, while G. papilio is another hardy runner with hooded purplish green flowers.

In recent years I’ve been growing ‘Boone’, in peachy-apricot, with a red streaked throat, and ‘Carolina Primrose’, in primrose yellow. Both have proved fully hardy and prolific. They were found in abandoned gardens in the chilly Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and have now arrived here in Britain.