Have you tested if they can survive the winter? Most of my gladiolas are grown in zone 5 and come back every year. I have a couple in zone 4 Binghamton that also come back every year and spread.

Love how you captured the light playing on them, especially the whites. Very pretty.

klavier -

We've actually never tried to leave them in the ground over the winter. I think that the original label or information with them said they were only hardy to zone 6 or maybe even zone 7, so we simply assumed that we had to dig the corms up if they were going to survive. Thanks for the info though - I'll have to think about it.

This year they're probably going to come inside anyways, simply because we placed them rather haphazardly this year and will probably want to put them in different locations next year.

The packages I bought all said zone 8 on them, butthey have always come back. I think the older varieties do better. I have some new ones that don't reproduce as quickly as others and over the years the pink ones have essentially disappeared. I have a bunch of yellow ones up against the house that come back every year, but have much smaller flowers and are more weedy. We used to have so many of them it was like an epidemic, they were everywhere. One year my mother decided they looked to weedy and dug them all up and left them in a pile in the woods. Before I could replant them half were dead. The next year a wood chuck came and decided he like the taste of the corm and destroyed half of the remaining half, some of which had six inch flowers and monster corms. And the winter before last had abnormally cold weather that was sustained for over two weeks killing half of the half of the half. So now we only have a few hundred plants, but tiny corms are showing up everywhere so in a couple of years they should be back to full glory.
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