Garden fairies explain mystery gladiola

Garden fairies here!

We are garden fairies and you should have seen the look on Carol’s face when she saw this white gladiola growing in the middle of Plopper’s Field, the garden border where she just plops plants in wherever there is a bare spot.

She looked quite startled when she saw this big glad towering up over some daylilies.  Then she looked puzzled and her brow kind of furrowed a little bit.   You know why she was all startled, puzzled, furrowed?

We are garden fairies and we will tell you why she was all startled, puzzled, furrowed.

She was all started, puzzled, furrowed because she could not remember planting this gladiola in the middle of Plopper’s Field.  She had absolutely no recollection.

Now many of you good readers are going to assume we garden fairies planted this gladiola here to play a trick on Carol.  We assure you we did not plant this here. Do you know how big a gladiola corm is? There is no way we garden fairies could move an entire gladiola corm, let alone plant it, even if we wanted to.

But we are garden fairies and we know how this gladiola came to grow in the middle of Plopper’s Field.  It’s a bit of a story, but it is absolutely true.

Years ago, out in the Vegetable Garden Cathedral, Carol planted some gladiola corms in one of the beds, just for decoration.  She thought it would be fun to grow them and besides, her Dad used to grow a row of glads in his vegetable garden, so she thought she would, too.

Well, as a general rule, Carol is a bit on the lazy side, so she planted them, they grew and flowered, and she enjoyed them, but she didn’t dig them up in the fall.  She just assumed they’d die out and that would be the end of them.

That next spring some of them did come up again, but by then Carol had purchased some daylilies and decided to plant them where the glads once grew. So she dug up the glads that had come up… most of them were just little sprouts which weren’t going to be big enough to bloom anyway… and planted the daylilies in that bed.

The next year, Carol decided to move the daylilies to Plopper’s Field. So she dug them all up and moved them and they have grown just fine.

What Carol didn’t know was that she didn’t dig up all those little glad sprouts like she thought. One of them managed to stay hidden amongst the daylilies and even got moved with a daylily to Plopper’s Field.

There it grew.  It must have grown for three seasons, hiding amongst the daylilies, until this summer.

Then this summer, the little glad which had hidden itself for so long, finally gave itself away by blooming. Because you know it’s hard to hide when you are a tall white flower like this glad growing in the middle of Plopper’s Field.

We are garden fairies and the good news in this story is Carol is going to leave the gladiola right where it was hiding all those years. See above about how she is a tiny bit lazy.

We are garden fairies. This makes us very happy.  Let the glad festival begin.

Submitted by:
Violet Greenpea Maydreams, Chief Scribe and Glad Hider at May Dreams Gardens