Meet My Yard: The Glads

I planted over 75 gladiolus bulbs this year.

That is not counting the ones we planted in the “Gladiolus Circle” last year.

They have multiplied… and they don’t look the same as last year.

This is what we had last year – the bright oranges and yellows, some purples peeking in the back. I only got a few of these colors this year. Here’s a pic of the same space:

Oh, I should mention that this blog post is gonna be VERY image-heavy, because, well, the glads are gorgeous and I know you wanna see the many different varieties.

I did a little bit of research and found out that this is a thing that glads do. You plant the corms (they are like little root ball thingies) and the flowers are a certain color the first year! In the following years, the strongest genes prevail, which tend to be yellow. So, I guess eventually, I will have an all-yellow Gladiolus Circle.

For now, I just have this:

and this:

As I was reading and researching, I read a post about a lady who planted a bunch of yellow Glad bulbs in 1999. For years, she cultivated these vibrant yellow blooms, leaving them in the ground over winter, some of which were hard.

Then, last year, in 2023 her glads started blooming and they were not yellow. Instead, they had rich maroon and variegated orange flowers. Neat!

This makes me very excited to see how mine change year after year. You know I will take pics of it.

So this year, after seeing how many bouquets and how much joy I got out of the glads last year, we decided to plant more.

Now, I will say, that we went a bit overboard with the bulb buying this year. We went to Menards and Ace a lot and whenever they had sales… well, we stocked up. And ended up with over 100 gladiolus bulbs.

Oops.

And then Mickey prepped a bed by the side of the, erm, side driveway and I planted some fucking bulbs y’all.

It is mostly gladiolus and tulips. However, there is one small selection of Allium that is incredible.

Allium will be getting its own bed next year. They are magical, last forever, and look like a piece of Tim Burton’s set design before he got fully Depp-ed.

The tulips bloomed in the early spring, so you’ll get a blog about those next year.

The Glads have been blooming for, like, a month and a half.

Here is a picture right before the new bed started blooming:

I go out and check on my gardens multiple times every day and one of my neighbors does too, so we see each other out there a lot. She gave me a bunch of seeds one day that I’ll be planting (and writing about!) soon.

Her yard is amazing, full of native plants, and just lovely to look at.

She doesn’t have many cut flowers in her garden. I guess that is what I am specializing in? Accidentally.

So, she also gave me a pretty big box filled with glass vases.

One, I filled with rocks and brought to Nadga. Now, every week I bring her a new flower, pop it in the vase and she has decor. (If you don’t know, Nadga is my ceramics teacher, she is in her 70s, from Ukraine, and has a lot of spunk).

That’s where some of my glads go. Sometimes she sends me pics throughout the week so I can see them bloom, too:

The rest of the over 100 glads in the yard of The Professor Haus end up in vases on various flat surfaces throughout the place once they’ve bloomed.

My friend Molls almost always gets a “desk flower update” when I put new flowers in my desk vase.

Y’all.

I think back to when we lived in Florida and I felt so awesome buying myself a fancy floral arrangement on a quarterly basis. I loved having them in the house and I loved watching them die.

Now, I’m making them myself. All the time. And the dead flowers go back into the earth that grew them and that makes me very happy.

Now, I will just include a gallery of the other glads I didn’t get to feature yet. There might be some repeats, but they’re all so pretty that I didn’t think you would mind. Also, this is my first time using my gallery feature!

I dig it. I will use it again.

Before I go, I wanted to share one final Glad pic. It is my favorite gladiolus that I’ve grown this year. A camera CANNOT do it justice, though.

I’ve never seen anything like this before. Its petals were so smooth and so delicate, but strong AF at the same time. It also looks like it was lit from within.

Like I aspire to be, I guess.