Sometimes the various breeding elements come together and you have on your hands a real hotchpotch and it invariably end up in the compost bin. The old adage it's not what you keep its what you throw springs to mind. But this one has the height of a Gladioli, but the flowers of a Primulinus. The striking plus points are the incredibly strong stems, thick flower petals, amazing colour and almost Cymbidium style flowers. All in all an amazing cutflower.
This web site prompts me to put something catchy in the title, well this early flowering Glad helped, but I'll be running out of superlatives at this rate. Unusually pointed petals, but such lush colouring.
Now the nerdy bit, one of the earliest crosses was between G tristis and G cardinalis resulted in The Bride, dating from 1823 and still in cultivation, its a winter growing, spring flowering Gladiolus. If you scroll down you'll see some pictures of G tristis. G tristis is such a great Glad to use and my first batch of crosses will be flowering next year, with the odd one flowering in late Autumn this year. Tristis and the Bride have been used by a few breeders, an Israeli company crossed a few summer large flowering Glads using tristis pollen a few years ago, the best one is a lush red flowering plant called Claudia and available from a few specialist bulb companies.
Another Gladioli resulting from these two plants is Galaxian. Not a favourite, but grown out of interest, early to flower, very short thin leaves, huge flowers not really in proportion and quite gaudy. It was there, so I put some pollen to it and that's where we are at, the currently unnamed seedling above. I'll hook it out in the Autumn and trial it properly, but the stand out feature is the fact the stems slightly hook over, but the flowers are still facing up, very similiar to G undulatus and quite wild like. Lots more Galaxian seedlings in the pipeline.
Its the same every season, expectations building for months only for the first few Gladioli to flower and disappoint. The first are dispatched to the compost bins pretty quickly, I really do resent their presence.
But its not long before the better ones flower and I know the season will improve with plants with G papilio blood flowering later in the season. They are easily spotted before the flowers appear with their thinner, sharper leaves. But this appeared yesterday, unassuming, very green and blending in beautifully, a great antidote to the exhibition style Gladiolas. Exactly the style I'm aiming for, almost wild like in its habit.
