RAMBLING REMARKS 
With this, our 1953 catalog, we send greetings and best wishes to our friends 
and customers everywhere! We hope that most of you had some fine glads last 
summer in spite of the hot, dry weather that prevailed over much of the country. 
In our planting, ample irrigation water kept the glads growing without a hitch, 
and we have harvested one of the finest crops of bulbs it has ever been our 
pleasure to grow. 
Indications are that large-size bulbs will be rather scarce this season in a 
good many varieties. However, as most experienced growers know, medium 
bulbs of number 3 size (the size we send out on orders for mediums as long as 
they last) will often produce just as good or even better flower spikes than the 
very large bulbs. Even a number four or number five bulb will make a good 
spike in many varieties. 
As usual, we have discontinued quite a few of the older varieties and have 
added several new kinds to our listing. We hope you will want to try out some 
of the new glads this year—in every way they are grand improvements over 
most of the older sorts. It takes no more work and no more garden space to 
grow the best, so why be satisfied with anything less! Whether you grow glads 
to win prizes at the shows, for high-quality cut flowers, or just for your own 
enjoyment and to share with friends, you will surely find new gardening thrills 
in growing some of the newer glads! 
We are often asked for a wholesale price list—perhaps we should explain to 
our customers just why we do not sell bulbs in large commercial quantities or 
grow the more common varieties. Our business is based primarily on the hybrid- 
izing of choice new varieties from seed, together with the growing of a limited 
number of the best newer varieties from other sources. 
No one who has not hybridized the gladiolus on a large scale can possibly 
realize the immense amount of work which it entails. The actual labor of cross- 
pollinating thousands of flowers consumes a large part of our time during the 
blooming season. Our first cross of the 1952 season was made on July 10; the 
last on September 20. Hundreds of separate crosses were made, most of them 
being repeated on spike after spike. 
From the 50,000 to 75,000 gladiolus seeds which we plant each spring, we 
will eventually select perhaps 200 seedlings to grow on for further observation. 
In addition to these are the hundreds of selections from the crosses of previous 
years, all of which must be carefully looked over and rated as they bloom, as 
must also the thousands of new seedlings blooming for the first time. And, of 
course, each selection has to be separately labeled and specially handled at every 
phase of the work—planting, digging, cleaning, and storing; with special atten- 
tion to those that may be finally selected for naming and introduction. 
Add to all this the tremendous amount of “book work” and record-keeping 
required for careful, conscientious work, and one begins to realize that gladiolus 
hybridizing can really be a full-time job! It also helps explain why a $5.00 price 
tag on a good new variety is not excessive, provided there is only a small stock 
of it in existence. We usually have only a few hundred bulbs of all sizes and 
a quart or two of bulblets, often less, at time of introduction. We have neither 
the time nor the space to propagate large quantities of our seedlings, or any of 
the varieties we grow. 
Our entire crop of fine bulbs, grown under ideal conditions (controlled mois- 
ture, clean sandy-loam soil) is available to our ever-increasing roster of retail 
buyers. We take special pride in the fact that our customer list includes many 
of the leading show-growers in nearly every state of the Union, as well as in 
several foreign countries. Many of the larger growers and prominent catalogers 
also obtain their starting stocks of newer varieties from us. If you have not 
yet bought bulbs from us, we invite you to send us a trial order this year. We 
trust that our catalog will be of help to you in making selections for your 1953 
glad garden. 
