The gladiolus, Gladiolus, is a corm-grown plant of tall one-sided spikes of funnel-flowers, native chiefly to Africa and the Mediterranean; its name is the Latin for a little sword, from the shape of its long pointed leaves, the same root as gladiator. That martial name shaped its symbolism from the classical world: the gladiolus was associated with the Roman gladiators, and to give it was to invoke strength, victory and moral integrity, the flower standing for a person of upright and unbending character, sharp and strong as its own leaf.
Although the name and its martial symbolism are Roman, the modern florist's gladiolus is very largely a nineteenth-century creation: of the roughly two hundred and sixty wild Gladiolus species, the great majority native to southern Africa, European and especially Dutch and Belgian breeders crossed a handful of South African species from the 1830s onward to produce the tall, large-flowered garden hybrids sold today, so that the sword-shaped leaf is ancient in name but the towering modern spike of bloom is a comparatively recent horticultural invention. South Africa remains the plant's true centre of wild diversity, with dozens of species found nowhere else, a botanical richness largely unknown to the Roman world that gave the flower its name.