June was so busy this year that I spent little productive time in the garden. I was still digging tulips right through the month. The summer blooming bulbs go in after the tulips are dug, and this year most were not planted until the last week of June. These summer blooming bulbs include a rag-tag assortment of Oxalis, Sprekelia, Zantedeschia, Dahlia, Zephyranthes, Habranthus, Hymenocallis and other odds and ends. This year I binged on garden glads to get an idea of what is going on in the glad world these days. In our climate it does not always pay to try to keep gladiolus going from year to year because to do so allows populations of thrips to build up. Past experience suggests that late planted glads are particularly vulnerable to thrips. So I generally grow them for a year or two and then, it the thrips get out of hand, discard the corms, wait a few years, and then start again. This year these late planted glads are giving me a surprise: the first ones are already in bloom – and they were planted only about five weeks ago! Books give various timings for the time from planting to bloom in glads, and the shortest timings I remember seeing were about sixty days. So this first blooming batch came in in about half that time. The cultivar in question is the one known as Nanus Halley (or just ‘Halley’). A glad cultivar of this name was in cultivation during the 1920s; its catalog description (“delicate salmon-pink”) suggests that it might be the same thing. The flowers of ‘Halley’ in my garden from a distance appear to be white, but when examined closely they can be seen to be delicately suffused with orange and pink. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/