Gladioli are stunning as cut flowers: provided you grow the stylish colours.
I’m sorry: I’m just going to put it out there. Gladioli are the best cut flowers, ever. You can argue with me until the cows have dragged their tired feet home and tucked themselves up in bed, but I shan’t change my mind ever.
There’s an important caveat here: I don’t just mean any old gladioli. I’m sorry, but there are so many alarmingly-coloured glads out there: canary yellow, strange peach, and a nasty sickly shade of barbie pink. I don’t meanΒ those gladioli at all. I mean these ones:
These are femme fatale flowers. I love cutting them from my allotment in armfuls and carrying them home. I always hope that as many people are around as possible to see me carrying them from the car and into the flat: I want them to know that I grew these incredible, long, stylish, dark, mysterious flowers. These are ‘Espresso’, and they look mighty fine in a tall vase all on their ownsome.
I also grow the lovely pure white gladiolus ‘White Prosperity’ on the plot. These have thicker spires of flowers than ‘Espresso’, and also look absolutely breathtaking just on their own in a large group in a vase. Some of them grow a little pink tinge around the edges as they age.
I enriched the soil in these flowers’ beds before I planted the corms, and I always give them a jolly good water when I’m at the allotment. I’ve started a potash-rich feeding regime now they are in flower to build up the strength of the bulb. You can start planting the corms in March, 8 inches deep, and stagger planting groups of 10 corms at a time over a period of five weeks if you can to ensure a long flowering season. If you’re in the south of England, you can probably leave the corms in the ground under a warm blanket of manure over winter. If you’re nervous, you can lift them and store over winter somewhere frost-free.
