Love is a Bag of Gladioli Corms

Gladioli marketing. Image by Gwynne Middleton.

I became a gardener in Colorado because, like my mother, I like being reminded I’m stubborn. The extreme weather and temperature fluctuations and the lack of water make gardening in the Denver metro area a lesson in persistence. Several years ago, I turned my attention from food gardening to flowers. You don't eat most flowers, but they feed a different part of us; for me, it’s the part that seeks beauty in a world that can be painfully rough around the edges.

The tall, graceful stalk of a gladiolus has always reminded me of an elegant swan. The brain is an odd organ, splicing together the reels of past experiences into memories that say more about the need for order than the bare facts.

In my mind, a gladiolus is a swan is a four-year-old girl standing beside her older brother at the edge of a pond in a lush, tree-lined park in New Orleans. It’s an image and a sensation, the dense, humid air trailing sweat down my back as we watch swans glide across the water’s surface. There are crickets chirping and insects buzzing, but you can’t see them. Trust me: The grass is dewed, and our saddle shoes are damp.

In a corner of the photo that is my memory, a bed of gladioli hovers. The blooms are lifted skyward like a frozen geyser. My left arm is locked inside a large plaster cast I'd earned after a klutzy misstep. I can’t see our faces because my brother and I are turned away from my mother and her Polaroid point-and-shoot. I know I don’t have freckles yet. That comes later, with all the awkwardness of plain Jane girlhood that will turn into invisible adolescence. Our clothes are clean. My hair is long and loose down the back of my sundress. Thick clouds swath the sky, but the daily summer storm hasn’t thundered over us yet. The swan is a white smudge with eyeliner, and the gladioli radiate red.

It’s this memory pinned to time and dilated like a dream that led me to grab a bag of gladioli at a garden store a few weeks before Mother’s Day The label affixed to the bag captured a technicolor mix of frilly blooms. Because gladioli are only winter hardy in growing zones 7-10 and the Denver area is 5b, I would need to dig them up in the autumn before the ground freezes. A quick internet search also taught me I’d misidentified gladioli as bulbs when, in fact, they are corms. Gladioli corms may look like onions (bulbs), but they have more in common with potatoes (tubers).

Corms are structurally different from flowering bulbs, which are actually underground stems with fleshy, scale-like layers surrounding a center bud. Instead, corms are solid and the bud is on the top of the corm rather than protected in the center of a bulb. When the corm exhausts its stored energy from the act of blooming, it will shrivel into a husk, and another corm forms on top of that one. Also, at the base of the original corm where the roots tendril, new baby corms--cormlets--form and can be separated to grow more gladioli.

The more I read about gladioli grown in Colorado, the more I doubted these little receptacles of life would have time to unveil their magic before the short Colorado summer ended. I grew gorgeous salad greens, plump tomatoes, shiny chilies, and crunchy carrots. With this experiment, I leapt into the flowery unknown. I could very well wait patiently for the first sign of a gladiolus stalk to stretch from its earthly bed only to be met in late August with a dull, mulched patch of soil that looks the same as when I prepared it.

I’m much older than my mother was when she had a daughter my daughter’s age, but I felt her with me when I set to work cultivating a space for flowers in our much smaller urban yard. Still, my commitment to valuing place came from her and my father. They raised my brother and me on the land where my father was born. That land is where I learned to grow food, but I never asked my mother how to grow flowers. I assumed flower gardening was impractical, and I didn’t have time for the impractical. At the height of her gardening years, the three acres we lived on in Alabama was hedged and treed and flowered mostly by her hands. Those hands were lean and tan, nicked from yard work and stained by nicotine.

These days I hold the memory of her gardening like a corm holds the secret to life. There she is, my mother, kneeling before a flower bed she dug. She presses her fingers into the soil to check moisture levels. There she is, months later, lovingly running her hand along a gladiolus stalk. Her hair is dark but threaded with copper that shimmers in the sunlight. Her hand lingers on this spray of flowers, a moment of reverence broken when she snips it free with garden shears and lays it on a growing pile of blossoms we’ll enjoy even as they wilt. What I knew then and what I understand now that she is gone, is that my mother was beautiful and also party to something beautiful. I was not beautiful like those flowers or my mother when she was at her best, but I could bear witness to beauty. In the act of helping something grow, I’ve learned, lives an acknowledgement of its inevitable conclusion.

That late spring I decided to grow flowers in Colorado, I dug up a patch of my yard and shook soil free from clumps of grass. I nestled gladioli corms into their temporary home and covered them with loose dirt, compost, and mulch. In silence, I prayed to the universe for another chance to bear witness to the beauty I encountered so long ago and which flickers like a ghost in my periphery.