Welcome! This is the homepage of Cates Family Glads, a small gladiolus and cut-flower farm located in central Maine. Owned and operated by Paul and Elisabeth Cates and family, Cates Family Glads provides a large variety of seasonal, wholesale cut-flowers for florists in the central and southern regions of Maine, as well as gladiolus bulbs for sale to the general public nationwide.
At Cates Family Glads, we specialize in heirloom gladiolus. For us, "heirloom" means any glad that was introduced for public use and sale at least twenty-five years ago. This year's heirloom "graduates" are cultivars first introduced in 1990. We carefully preserve these little pieces of floral history, making a few dozen varieties available in our catalog each year. Like all varieties of gladiolus, heirloom cultivars vary in speed of propagation, so if there's a glad you saw in our listing in years past that isn't listed in the current catalog, please contact us -- we may have a few bulbs to spare.
In addition to heirlooms, in recent years we have begun to develop a collection of Eastern European glads which we are pleased to be able to rotate into the American market a few varieties at a time. These Slavic cultivars keep wowing us with their visual appeal; we can't help but collect them!
2015 marks the 45th anniversary of Cates Family Glads, and to celebrate, we are offering an Early Bird Special to our bulb customers! For more details on our anniversary special, please check out our online catalog page.
The 2015 print catalogs are out! If you are on our mailing list, you should be receiving your copy shortly.
If you are not on our catalog mailing list and would like to be for 2016, please get in touch.
Our bulb catalogs are typically shipped in late January; bulb orders are shipped by late April. Orders received past late April may not be able to be fulfilled, because planting begins only a couple of weeks after the last frost. Please note that due to the hurdles which growers are required to navigate in order to ship plant matter internationally, we currently ship only to customers within the United States.
Please note that this year, as in last, we've divided our catalog into heirloom and general listings. We hope to be able to continue bringing you healthy, beautiful heirloom varieties of gladiolus for years to come.