My Favorite Monday -- Flowers

It's been a while since I played along with Tiburon's "My Favorite Monday", but I've got a couple of minutes to spare before a meeting today and the topic caught my attention: My Favorite Flower.

I've got a couple of different "favorites" -- I love the tulips and irises in the Springtime. I have some nice tulips in my front flower bed & am very hopeful that I'll have even more next year thanks to my fortuitous score earlier this year. While those are nice, however, my all-time-favorite is the Gladiolus.

Glads are a very versatile flower. They come in many different colors, and like tulips, some of them can be multi-hued, with one color in the center and a different color around the edges. They can be upscale and elegant (think white glads arranged with red roses) or everyday and homey (say, a spray of various colored glads mixed together).

Because they have multiple blooms on a single stalk, they are a long-lasting flower. They bloom from the bottom up, so even if the first flowers are fading, newer ones further up the stalk are just opening.

I used to have quite a few glads that would bloom in my front flower bed, but they've not been doing so well in the past few years. I think the bulbs I had have "run their course" -- either that or the squirrels got 'em. Either way, I need to plant new ones.

The one complaint I have about them is that since they are tall & can get "top heavy" with blooms, they tend to get knocked down/fall over if there's a heavy rain. With the heat and humidity we get here in DC, it's not surprising to get frequent thunderstorms, some of which can be quite heavy, resulting in quite a few glads that need to be cut/brought inside, often all at once. At times, I've had too many to know what to do with -- glads in a vase on the kitchen table, on the hall table, in my room, in the family room, etc. But, hey! That's a problem I can learn to live with!!