Michigan Gladiolus

The Gladiolus is the flower that commands a room from across it: a tall, upright spike stacked with large, ruffled florets that open from the bottom up, in a palette that runs from soft coral and cream to burgundy, lavender, and clean white, often with a painted throat. Its very name comes from the Latin for sword, a nod to both its blade-like leaves and its dramatic vertical form. A few stems in a tall vessel make an arrangement all by themselves.

Members of the genus Gladiolus grow from corms and originate largely in South Africa, so they are not hardy in the Michigan ground over winter. Our growers plant fresh corms each spring and often stagger the plantings every couple of weeks, which is exactly what stretches the harvest across the back half of summer and gives us that long August-into-September run of color.

Glads are a wonderfully generous cut flower. Because the florets open in sequence up the spike, a single stem keeps evolving for a week or more, and snipping the faded lower blooms keeps the show going. For big, bold, budget-friendly summer color, few flowers deliver like a bucket of gladiolus.