The Best Thing Blooming in April
One of the best performers in April is the true heirloom Byzantine gladiolus.
Say the word “gladiolus” and most people picture the funeral spray — the four-foot thing that falls over in a light breeze and has to be staked, lifted, and replanted, and that most gardeners quietly hate. Forget all of that. This is a graceful wildflower with small, elegant blooms in a magenta so intense that Felder Rushing calls it “shocking.” It looks more like an orchid than a glad.
And it comes back. Every year. Bigger. Without lifting, without staking, without you.
That is a very short list in the gladiolus world. This may be the only member of it that a southern gardener can rely on.
Corn Flag of Constantinople
The history here goes back further than almost anything else I sell that isn’t an iris.
Its early names were the corn flag of Constantinople and the Turkish flag — “flag” for the iris-like leaves, and “corn” in the old sense, meaning all grains. Because this is a plant of grain fields. Its corms sit deep enough to duck under the plough-share, and it has ornamented farmed ground since ancient times, the same way the corn poppy did.
You’ll see 1576 given as the year it entered gardens. I can’t stand that one up. I went looking for it in the obvious places — Gerard’s Herball of 1597 lists three corn flags and no Constantinople; Clusius in 1601 has a pile of “Byzantinum” plants and no gladiolus among them — and every modern source repeating 1576 traces back to a single uncited line in a nursery catalog. Treat it as trade lore.
What I can point to is 1629, when John Parkinson wrote it up in Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris under the heading “Gladiolus Byzantinus. Corne Flagge of Constantinople.” That’s the earliest solid mention I’ve found in English.
Here I have to correct something I’ve seen repeated a lot, including in copy I nearly used myself. Parkinson is often quoted as saying his friend John Tradescant “saw many acres of ground in Barbary spread over with them,” as though Tradescant had found this plant carpeting North Africa. Go read the actual page and it doesn’t say that. Parkinson describes six different corn flags and then writes one collective note on where they all grow: “They grow in France and Italy, the least in Spaine, and the Byzantine, as it is thought, about Constantinople… John Tradescant assured mee, that hee saw many acres of ground in Barbary spread over with them.” Them is plural. It refers to the whole group, not the Byzantine. Tradescant in North Africa was almost certainly looking at a different species. The quote gets spliced across a section break to build a link Parkinson never made, and I’d rather hand you the real sentence.
The other thing Parkinson says about it is funnier, and true: he found it “more tender and lesse able to abide our sharpe cold Winters.”
By 1820 the corms were being advertised in America — the William Prince Nursery catalog in Flushing, New York, listed the purple Gladiolus communis at 12 cents each, a dollar a dozen, and the scarlet byzantinus at 50 cents each, five dollars a dozen. Five times the price of its ordinary cousin, two hundred years ago. And Prince marked it with an asterisk, which his own front page defines as denoting the plants that are tender.
Sit with that a second. Parkinson in 1629 and Prince in 1820, two centuries apart, both charged more for this plant and both warned you it was delicate. It now naturalizes in Texas cemeteries that nobody has watered since the Eisenhower administration. They were right about the price and dead wrong about the plant.
C.L. Allen, in his 1893 Bulbs and Tuberous-Rooted Plants, called it “the most hardy . . . and particularly desirable for the border, as it is free-flowering. When once planted, it may remain undisturbed, like the Narcissus, for many years.” (Allen also called it “a native of Turkey,” which modern taxonomy doesn’t support — the range runs the western Mediterranean, Spain to Sicily to Morocco. Which, you’ll notice, makes Tradescant’s Barbary sighting look a good deal less accidental, and “Constantinople” look like a naming mistake we’ve all been repeating for four hundred years.)
The Royal Horticultural Society gave it an Award of Garden Merit in 1993, and it held onto it through the 2012 review.
How It Became a Southern Plant
Greg Grant, writing in The Southern Heirloom Garden with William Welch (1995), said it as plainly as it can be said:
“The heirloom gladiolus which is most common in Southern gardens is Gladiolus byzantinus. This species thrives in old cemeteries, abandoned homesites, and along ditch banks, for unlike the fussy modern hybrids, G. byzantinus is a survivor, and a true perennial.”
Old cemeteries. Abandoned homesites. Ditch banks. That’s my whole territory, and this is one of the plants I find out there most reliably.
Elizabeth Lawrence, writing about the farm market bulletins in Gardening for Love, found southern farm women selling it under the name Jacob’s ladder — a name she believed English cottagers had been using since the beginning of the seventeenth century. She doesn’t say where she got that, and I haven’t been able to run it down, so take the date as Lawrence’s belief rather than an established fact. But if she was right, the plant crossed the Atlantic carrying its folk name intact, and centuries later a woman in a southern county was still calling it what a woman in an English village called it, and neither of them had any idea.
That’s how these things actually move. Not through the trade. Through hands.
The Impostor Problem
Now the part you need before you spend a dollar anywhere.
True Byzantine glad stock is all but impossible to find. Many sources offer it. What you’ll get most of the time is an impostor — usually a wan, pinkish thing that authorities identify as the closely related G. communis subsp. communis, sometimes the smaller-flowered G. illyricus or G. italicus. Pale, wimpy, and not even close to exciting.
Why does this keep happening? Because the impostor can be raised quickly and cheaply from seed, while the true G. byzantinus rarely if ever sets seed and has to be multiplied by offsets — slower and much more expensive for a grower.
Which means price is your best guide. If somebody offers you Byzantine glads for very little, you’re not getting Byzantine glads. It’s the same logic as a twenty-dollar Rolex.
These bulbs are the real deal — true heirloom stock. It makes a difference both in the color and in the stalks staying upright. Many colorful, large-blooming imitators tend to fall over in normal gardens and demand more maintenance than most people are willing to give. The Byzantine stays proportionate and delivers a magenta rarely found in any other bulb.
And note what that seed-sterility means. Like the white cemetery iris, like the orange daylily, this plant has spread by being carried. The little cormels form around the base of the mother corm, somebody digs a clump, somebody hands it over. Two hundred years of Americans doing that, and four hundred of Europeans before them.
Digging in Red Clay
My brother helped me dig some of our first Byzantine gladioli from a small town in East Texas.
We dug in red clay and had to fight for every bulb. Many were left behind — the site continues to look beautiful even today. Afterward we went to a local gas station to wash up, and the red dirt mixed with water looked more like the color of blood. By that point we looked like genuinely suspicious characters: tired, filthy, and covered in this dirt-and-water combination. Nobody said anything. We soon had the bulbs at their new home on the farm.
Early in our farming career we thought we had a great start. About 2,000 Byzantine glads in a nice neat row in the sandy loam of Northeast Texas. I’ll never forget when some of the tips began to look yellow. While I was inspecting the row, some of the foliage down the line began to move — almost shake. It wasn’t a windy day.
I walked up and gently pulled, and the foliage came smoothly out of the ground with nothing attached to the other end. The corm had been eaten.
Pocket gophers had found our nice row, and in a matter of a week they devoured almost all 2,000 corms. It was devastating. We now have several growers across the South raising these for us, because the gophers on our farm found them particularly delicious.
That’s the one real enemy this plant has. Pamela Harper, in Time-Tested Plants, wrote that in her Virginia garden the corms “have sunk” to some eighteen inches down — “well below frost level and deeper than voles usually search for food.” Note her verb: they sank over the years, she didn’t plant them there. The plant takes itself out of reach. It just couldn’t hide from the gophers of Northeast Texas.
Uses in the Landscape
This bulb can be used to spruce up ditches and other hard-to-garden areas. Great color and texture combinations can be made with the lanceolate foliage and the long inflorescence of blooms.
Even old clumps bloom quite readily, but if you want, this rapid multiplier can be divided and spread to border large areas of fence line or garden. It thrives in all kinds of southern soil types and regions.
Magenta is a hard color and a great one. Blue is a good companion — Harper points out it flowers alongside blue baptisias, amsonias, Siberian irises, and Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’. Christopher Lloyd tucked it up against border phloxes, where it wouldn’t be in the way after flowering, and also liked it in a meadow, “where it holds its own well.”
Shortly after flowering the leaves wither and the corms go dormant for the summer, so it never overstays.
Planting & Care
Sun: It actually performs best in full sun. As long as it has enough sun, it stands upright on its own — the sun is the staking.
Soil: Well drained. In drier areas it also thrives in heavy clay.
When: Normally a fall-planted gladiolus that blooms in spring. Sometimes we ship these in the green, right after they’ve bloomed — allow the foliage to die back naturally, cut it off once brown, and wait for new foliage in January and February.
Foliage: Don’t cut it back after flowering. Let it turn yellow and dry before you remove it — that’s the corm building its food supply for next year.
Zones: Hardy from zone 6’s cold winters to zone 10’s early April heat. Further north it’s sometimes called the hardy gladiolus, because it can be fall-planted and takes cold better than other glads. The heirloom specialists at Old House Gardens reported back in 2006 that it had come through nine of the previous ten winters in their own Ann Arbor garden, at the top of zone 6 — one garden, one stretch of winters, but it’s a real data point from people who were watching.
Blooms: Clustered on a two- to three-foot stalk. April here in Texas; late May into mid-June farther north. Deer and rabbit resistant.
The Bulb Worth Fighting Clay For
Old House Gardens has shipped these to satisfied customers in 39 states, from coastal Maine to southern California — that’s a sales map rather than a hardiness study, but it tells you something about the range of places this plant will consent to live. Christopher Lloyd loved them. Allan Armitage praises them. They grow at Colonial Williamsburg and at the Denver Botanic Garden and at Great Dixter, and they grow in Greg Grant’s yard in Texas, and they grow in ditches outside towns you’ve never heard of.
But the place I want you to picture is the one my brother and I found — an old site in a small East Texas town, red clay, nobody tending it, magenta coming up every April for longer than anyone alive could remember. It’s still beautiful today. We only took some.
Plant a few. Let them clump. And when they do, dig a piece for somebody, because for four hundred years that has been the only way this flower has ever gotten anywhere.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com
Shop Byzantine Gladiolus (Gladiolus byzantinus) →
Starting at $15.00