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 1992. 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!
The 2017 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 next year's catalog, please get in touch.
This year we are promoting sales of summer table garlic, grown by Paul and Elisabeth's daughter Helen and her husband Brad. Table and seed garlic will be available in mid-to-late summer; we'll have more information about this soon.
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 and website into heirloom and general listings. We hope to be able to continue bringing you healthy, beautiful heirloom varieties of gladiolus for years to come.