The great gladioli revival
WHEN I first started as a garden writer, I would have been hard pressed to find someone brave enough to admit that they liked gladioli. Back in the late 1990s gladioli were considered a floral relic from a bygone age, and most articles mentioning them tended to be dismissive. I admit I played my part in their persecution, labelling these tuberous perennials as ‘brash’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘unfashionable’.
A few decades earlier, I would have been run out of town for horticultural blasphemy. During the 1940s
