A wild cormous herb of the iris family with sword-shaped leaves and a spike of flowers, found in savanna grassland.
Gladiolus dalenii (family Iridaceae, the iris family) is an upright, robust perennial that grows from an underground corm up to 3 cm across. It produces six to ten sword-shaped leaves up to 120 cm long and a flowering stem about 70 to 120 cm tall, carrying spikes of yellow to scarlet flowers, often streaked red over a yellow ground, generally with a yellow throat. It is one of the most widely distributed species of Gladiolus, found in most of Africa except the Sahara and North Africa, the Namib desert and Somalia, and also in Madagascar and western Arabia. It is unusual in its genus in having diploid, tetraploid and hexaploid races, and it is the main parent of the large-flowered garden gladioli.
It is commonly used locally as a source of food, medicine and soap. It is gathered from the wild and sometimes cultivated, including outside its native range in West Africa, and it is widely grown in gardens for its striking flowers. It grows in grassy places and open woods, in dry and wet meadows, occasionally in boggy places, and on rocky ridges, up to 2,000 metres in Natal. It is native mainly to the seasonally dry tropics of Africa, in areas with summer rainfall, and it prefers a sunny, sheltered position in well-drained, light, sandy, neutral to slightly acid soil. The plant is said to inhibit the growth of legumes. It is raised from seed, or from the young corms that form around the parent, planted about 12 cm deep.
Sources: Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.); Wikipedia, "Gladiolus dalenii".
A wild geophyte that grows from an underground corm, dying back to the corm in the dry season.